May 26, 2026
TOPIC: OPPOSING ACA 7
Honorable Members of the Senate Education Committee:
Please vote no on ACA 7. NO MORE government mandate for racial favors. Time and again, Californians have demonstrated our common distaste for government preferences. Most recently, over 57% of the electorate voted to keep these precious words in the California Constitution:
“The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, and public contracting.”
Many of our organization’s founding members participated in the movement. In fact, almost thirty years ago, ERFA President Ward Connerly led the California Civil Rights Initiative which facilitated the passage of Proposition 209. In 2020, Mr. Connerly and many others fought the triumphant “No on 16” campaign. While the grassroots campaign was limited by meager funds, “racial reckoning” news frenzy, media biases, and celebrity opposition, the majority of Californians, numbered at 9.65 million, agreed with us.
It was a total shock to us that our State Legislature was at it again to try to repeal Prop. 209 via ACA 7. We must voice our grave concern with you, since 54 Assembly Members voted yes to pass the bill to the State Senate. Perhaps these elected officials feel insulated from their constituents or feel so invisible that they can liberally legislate racial preferences. At any rate, we sincerely hope you would be different, putting common sense and reason above party ideology.
On a personal note, many of our friends and allies are of African-American descent, just like our president Mr. Connerly. The fact that ACA 7 is promoted by the California Black Legislative Caucus as one of its priorities in the reparations package is deeply insulting. A new Sacramento Bee opinion piece entitled “This Black History Month, California must embrace equity for Black residents” is blatantly calling the public to support the measure on account of racial justice. Both can’t be further away from the truth. The real justice all Californian children, including black students, deserve is equal treatment. They deserve to have equal access to quality education. More importantly, they deserve the dignity and respect that they can excel and thrive, regardless of their skin color.
Giving the government authority to handout preferences on the basis of race will not undo the historical wrongs of slavery. Nor can that alleviate present-day gaps of any sort. On the contrary, government-endorsed racial programs will inevitably create more injustices. In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell wrote:
[I]t remains painfully clear that those people who were torn from their homes in Africa in centuries past and forcibly brought across the Atlantic in chains suffered not only horribly, but unjustly. Were they and their captors still alive, the reparations and the retribution owed would be staggering. Time and death, however, cheat us of such opportunities for justice, however galling that may be. We can, of course, create new injustices among our flesh-and-blood contemporaries for the sake of symbolic expiation, so that the son or daughter of a black doctor or executive can get into an elite college ahead of the son or daughter of a white factory worker or famer.
We want to use this opportunity to share a column on ACA 7 below. In it, ERFA friends and authors (Wenyuan Wu and Eli Steele) elaborate on strong reasons for opposing the bill. We hope you will read it and consider our concerns when ACA 7 comes to you for a vote on June 3rd.
Sincerely,
Equal Rights for All Pac
<Click to download ERFA-Position-Letter-against-AB-7.pdf>