Hello. I’m Joel Britton, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of California. I’m on the special recall election ballot as “Joel Britton—Independent, Retired Meat Packer.”

A long-time trade unionist, Black rights and antiwar activist, I serve on the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.

I have been asked whether I support or oppose Proposition 54, the proposed amendment to the California constitution that is on the recall election ballot.

According to the Official Voter Information Guide Proposition 54 is supposed to “prohibit state and local governments from using race, ethnicity, color or national origin to classify current or prospective students, contractors or employees in public education, contracting, or employment operations.”

I am opposed to both the “Vote Yes on 54” and the “Vote No on 54” campaigns being waged and take a “Not voting” position.

Ward Connerly, the conservative Republican who heads the “Vote Yes” campaign cynically claims that if Proposition 54 receives a majority of ballots cast it will help create a “color-blind” society. This, from a well-known opponent of affirmative action measures to redress current-day inequalities and discrimination against working people who are Black, especially.

Without a fight to end such inequalities and discriminatory practices, working people will be unable to wage united struggle against the wealthy families who rule this country through their twin Democratic and Republican parties.

As we build a revolutionary workers movement that can fight for a workers and farmers government that will put an end to capitalism—which breeds racist oppression and discrimination of all types—a “color-blind” society will then become possible. This is not what Connerly and Co. have in mind.

Those campaigning for a “No” vote on Proposition 54 include Democratic governor Gray Davis, his Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante, Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco, many trade union officials, and leaders of health-care and other organizations. They all falsely claim that unless this measure is defeated, it will be impossible to fight racist discrimination in housing, education, medical care, and employment.

We can lead a fight against racist discrimination without promoting reliance on government collection of “racial” statistics. The civil rights fighters of the 1950s and 1960s—part of a mass proletarian struggle that brought down the Jim Crow system of statutory segregation throughout the South—didn’t need “racial” data from governmental bodies to convince people that something had to be done. What’s more, as Malcolm X taught us, it is the government that was responsible for maintaining racist oppression in the South and in the North. That is still true today.

Los Angeles police chief William Bratton and other top police officials in the state have come out against Proposition 54, saying that the measure would hurt their efforts to stop “racial profiling” and “protect against hate crimes.” These pronouncements take the fakery to a higher level. The purpose of police is to mete out punishment, to keep workers in line, to make an example of you if you come from the wrong class—even more so if you happen to be the wrong color or the wrong nationality. It is worth remembering that far more working people are executed by a policeman’s bullet, chokehold, or hog-tying than by lethal injection or electrocution, even with the unrelenting climb in state-sanctioned murders since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

The logic of the “Vote No” on Prop 54 forces is to rely on governmental bodies, instead of relying on ourselves and our own capacities, of organizing ourselves in struggles independent of them.

Liberal “Vote No” campaigners falsely claim that passage of Prop 54 would have a “devastating impact” on civil rights and would “roll back 40 years of hard-won civil rights gains.” But to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement would take a massive counterrevolutionary movement. And that is simply not on the agenda. The Supreme Court ruling this past summer upholding affirmative action in university admissions registered this fact.

Vote “Yes” to recall Governor Davis and then vote Socialist Workers—for “Joel Britton, Independent, Retired Meat Packer.”

Visit www.themilitant.com for more information on the Socialist Workers Party campaign. To make a much-needed financial contribution, make out a check to Socialist Workers Campaign Committee and send it to 4229 S. Central Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90011. To volunteer to help campaign, call (323) 233-9372.
 
 
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