Did you think that affirmative action is illegal in America? Well, it’s not. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling and the widespread unpopularity of affirmative action among voters, some Democratic legislators keep trying to ram through laws based on racial preferences and skin-color entitlements. That is illegal and immoral.
One such piece of legislation is California Assembly Bill 57. Entitled the “California Dream for All Program: Descendants of Formerly Enslaved People,” it was authored by Tina McKinnor, a Democrat Assembly member representing Hawthorne (Los Angeles County). It was approved by the Assembly and is currently working its way through the California Senate. (One of its co-authors was Oakland’s own Mia Bonta.) The bill would require the State of California to award 10 percent of the money in a special housing entitlement fund, run by the California Housing Finance Agency, to “descendants of formerly enslaved people.” The recipients would be certified by a new California agency, the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, whose creation is now also working its way through the California Senate. That bill, SB 518, by Sen. Akilah Weber-Pierson (D-San Diego), was approved by the Assembly and handed over to the Senate on Sept. 9. It is heavily backed by organizations that hope to pass Reparations for African Americans in California. The two bills—“California Dream” and “Descendants of Enslaved Persons”—are clearly associated; in fact, the text of AB 57 reads, “This act shall become operative only if Senate Bill 518 of the 2025–26 Regular Session is enacted.” Both bills, presuming they pass, thus will need to be signed by the Governor.
We can have a separate discussion about Reparations, which I’m inclined to oppose, at least until I see the bill’s final details. But as far as AB 57, the “California Dream” proposal (McKinnor and Bonta’s bill), I’m a firm NO. AB 57 proposes to invest “up to one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) per year for first-time homebuyers,” in the bill’s own words. Even if you believe that “descendants of formerly enslaved people” are morally entitled to help with buying homes, $1 billion per year is wildly excessive, at a time when California is facing a $12 billion budget deficit, according to Gov. Newsom, who said in announcing the impending shortfall, “We’ve got a spending problem. We can deny that we have a shortfall. We can deny that we have a deficit. We can deny we have a problem in the system and we could put it off and be irresponsible.”
I personally doubt that Newsom would sign either AB 57 or SB 518, although he might split the difference and approve the latter. This isn’t just because Newsom himself is something of a budget hawk, but because with his eye on the 2028 Presidential election, the last thing he needs is to defend himself against conservative attacks that he’s too liberal to be trusted, an accusation that his support for a nationally-unpopular Reparations bill would certainly bolster. Newsom has indicated in the past that he’s against Reparations, but the pressure from the left wing of his own party is mighty, and he might cave if it looks he would lose the support of his own California Democrats going into the 2027 primaries.
The fact is, AB 57 is an abomination. The people of California, no less than the people of the United States, have firmly declared they do not want their tax dollars going to laws that mandate racial preferences. The U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has stated the same thing, most recently in a pair of 2023 rulings on university admissions. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the race-based [affirmative action] admission guidelines of Harvard and the University of North Carolina "cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause" and argued that college admissions should evaluate prospective students as individuals, not on the basis of race. I honestly don’t understand why Assembly member McKinnor doesn’t understand that racial preference policies in America are and ought to be dead. She might not like it, but she’s wasting the Legislature’s (and our) time with her antics.
Conclusion
We’re never going to have an “equal” society where everyone has exactly the same amount of money, the same job prospects, the same healthcare, or the same anything else. Nor will we have a society where just as many Asian or White men are in prison as there are Black men. Different racial groups have different abilities and proclivities; we might as well insist that the NBA have 60% White people as players because that’s their percentage of the U.S. population, as the “proportional representation” crowd insists. That’s just not how life is. Those societies that have tried such dumb social experiments ended up as dictatorships and economic and cultural basket cases (like the old Soviet Union). It’s not government’s role to assure equal outcomes in every area for each citizen. We’ve got to get back to the only system upon which all human progress is or ever has been based: meritocracy.
Steve Heimoff