（改写 Mikeguy贴)
As a Chinese American, I believe Affirmative Action is reasonable and helpful for the minorities. It took effective in 1961, designed to provides advantage for people who have been traditionally discriminated against in the society, with the aim of creating a more egalitarian society through preferential access to education, employment and so on. These benefited subsets are mainly people who suffered from the slavery era in USA. Affirmative Action required that colleges, business, etc take the best qualified person without regard to race, religion, national origin, gender, and race.
It is well known that Affirmative Action breaks down barriers from existing discrimination to ensure all individuals have an equal opportunity to demonstrate their talents and abilities. And this on-going SCA5 simply removes publication education from the Prop 209 which prohibits the State from considering race, sex, color , ethnicity or national origin in the areas of public employment, public education and public contracting. By diminishing the equal opportunity, the essence of Affirmative Action, SCA5 allows race, sex, color can be considered in college admission. The root cause of SCA5 is the lack of diversity in California public universities, and the main target is so-called too many Asians in UC systems, and Latino, African American, and Native American are underrepresented in UC systems.
However, these are definitely not true. The reasons are as follows.
Firstly, Latino people is never a minority, and they take 39% of California populations and traditionally they are not victims of discrimination in US history. For Asian Americans, especially Chinese, in 1882, a discriminating law named Chinese Exclusion Act took effective despite the contributions those Chinese had made, and even now, this kind of discriminating laws are still lurking in some people`s minds and now it is in the disguise of SCA5.
Secondly, is it true that Asian American are over-represented? The answer is NO if you take all the students in public colleges in California into account, instead of focusing only on one or two elite universities like UCLA or UC Berkeley. Please read the two figures below.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
From the above figures, in UC system, Latino group is the fastest growing group by admission. Asia American’s admission ratio essentially has no change. After P209, the admission ratio of Latino group had a flat period between 1995 and 2004. But after UC system adopted a “holistic” review process in 2004, Latino ethnic group's admission ratio raised tremendously. White people dropped very fast and African American got even. Data shows that if UC uses AA today, the most benefactor group will be Latino under the cost of Asia American, especially in the most competitive campuses USLA and UCB because most Asia American are more competitive. In CSU, there are similar trends for Latino, White, African American and Asia American. Especially for Latino, its enrollment ratio surpassed white. All those data shows Latino well utilized California’s education resources. What Senator Hernandez wants is more admission of Latino in top notch schools such as UCLA and UCB under the slogan of racial diversity.
Obviously, SCA5 does not support Affirmative Action, and the root cause of proposing SCA5 does not exist at all. Instead of pushing out SCA5 strenuously, Senate Hernandez should re-direct his hard work on passing bills to help improving the quality of public education, to have all students well prepared and more competitive, not to use race as an admission factor, and in this way, the essence of Affirmative Action is maintained.
Let us pay attention to what Ward Connerly Said: “You gotta start much earlier in the life cycle of the student, It’s the flaw of families, of cultures — a number of things that shouldn’t be corrected by giving some kids extra points or lowering the standard.” (Ref 4)
