Non-Citizen Voting And The Racial Swirl Of San Francisco Politics

The Los Angeles Times reports today that a proposal to allow non-citizens to vote in San Francisco school board elections is dividing the Chinese-American community there. Chinese-American students make up 31% of the students in the San Francisco Unified School District, making them the largest demographic group.

I mentioned this controversy about a month ago, here, but didn’t realize then (Pitfalls of Blogging #206: Bloggers, like journallists, often write about subjects on which they have done little work and know nothing) that just underneath the surface this debate, like so much in San Francisco and elsewhere, actually concerns race.

The Chinese community in San Franciso is, and has been for a while, agitated about something known as the “diversity index,” which grew out of a lawsuit the NAACP filed against the city schools in the 1970s claiming racial segregation. As a result of that litigation the city imposed a policy requiring every school to have students representing at least four racial or ethnic groups and limiting each school to no more than 45% of one racial/ethnic group. Then, as a result of that “solution,” the Chinese community sued the school district, claming successfully that it was now the victim of hard quota discrimination, and the “diversity index” was born as part of a settlement of that suit.

Foreshadowing a number of later debates about “diversity,” the diversity index attempted to duplicate the results of racial assignments without explicitly taking race into account by using various socio-economic indicators. No group has been satisfied, especially the Chinese whose children are often bused over two hours to inferior schools. (This discussion is based on a number of articles that can be found by Googling “San Francisco” and “diversity index.” A good, succinct summary can be found here.)

Perhaps nowhere is it clearer than in San Francisco that the Emperor of “Diversity” is wearing no clothes, that race-based, force-fed “diversity” programs predictably produce bitterness and divisiveness. As noted in the San Francisco Examiner article cited above,

Instead of achieving racial harmony, the diversity index sparked tremendous and emotional discord between neighborhoods, ethnic groups, parents and students.

“You are dividing everyone across The City,” said Mel Lee, a city resident who said he had an interest in school-district issues and is one of the founders of the Asian Contractors Association.

Not only was the divisiveness produced by “diversity” predictable, it was in fact actually and accurately predicted by many early critics of racial preference. A both good and sad example is the following from Nathan Glazer’s prescient AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION (1975) (which I quoted in a similar post here). Racial preferences, he predicted, will produce

a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment…. The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don’t.

This statement is “good” because it was so perceptive, and “sad” because in his later work its author has abandoned its insight.