Mr. Ward Connerly, the president of “Equal Rights for All PAC”(website: http://erfapac.com), father of CA Prop 209, civil rights hero gave a speech in front of the SCOTUS, regarding SFFA against Harvard on College Admission Discrimination.
“Do the right thing, and make sure that all of us receives the full measure of equality.”
Ward Connerly (Twitter: @tobeequal)
“I’m so honored and pleased with my fellow Americans who happen to be Asian descent along with my background which is all over the darn planet. We are here in the truest tradition: Janice Camarena. Think about this last name. Janice Camarena, my old ally of 25 or 26 years in this battle. Our being here today is consistent with the truest tradition of our nation. A Justice is being done and we come to ask it to be addressed. Do the right thing and make sure that all of us receive the full measure of equality.
One of the things I learned as a person serving a 12-year sentence on the board of Regents of the University of California was that indeed discrimination was occurring. People of Asian descent were marginalized. Your kids were told to go to school to study hard, and good things would happen. UC on which I was serving as a regent was making a lie of that. Different standards for kids on the basis of skin color and where their grand daddy happened to be born. That was occurring. A point system by Berkeley was being used. I could do no less than saying this is wrong. Stop it!
So we joined the history of this country which was founded as Lincoln said, conceived in the liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That means people like me black people; that includes people of Asian descent Americans who were classified as colored.
And I was born with a “C” on my birth certificate. That was not for “Connerly;” it’s for “colored.”
We have to fight to get that “C” acknowledged as a full American. What is happening today is that US citizens members of the court, I am here to ask the court to correct the mistake that you made.
Tomorrow, my dear friend Ed Blum is going to join the attorneys as a plaintiff for Students for Fair Admissions and formally petition the government to do the right thing.
They will be civil. They will be using the merits of the law. But I’m here, I’m not as an attorney, and I’m not a member of the BAR (I have enough problems to deal with), but I’m here as a citizen to say when you allowed the use of race as one of the many factors for admission to college, you unleashed racism of the worst kind. And I’m not a man of many factors in the eyes of my government. I’m a colored man, a negro, a black man, a person of color. They never see anything other than color. So for the court to allow the use of race, they were legitimizing discrimination. The only public institutions of our society that are allowed to discriminate are select colleges and universities. That’s wrong. So I say to the court, do the right thing and correct your mistake (crowd cheering). We all have to recognize this is not just about Harvard or the University of North Carolina. There is only a small number of people who would even want to go to Harvard. But all of us are citizens of America. And this is about how we interact with each other, how we work with each other, how we lock arms to make this country a better country (crowd cheering), to fulfill the promise of America. Dr. King had a dream; and I have a nightmare that if we don’t get this right, diversity and equity and inclusion will be the death of the country that we love and that we know. So we are asking the court to fulfill once and for all, the promise that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. In Webster that means you cannot take that away from us. Among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. That’s all we ask. We are not asking for a holiday as you gave Dr. King. Just give us our rights.
Thank you!”
Related Link: