Andrea Guerrero was last heard from here four years ago, offering a “c’est moi!” defense of affirmative action: racial preferences are good and necessary because she benefited from them, both as an undergraduate at Stanford, where she “was admitted under affirmative action,” and then again to the law school at Berkeley. “Were it not for race-conscious admissions,” she admits,
I would not have been admitted to Stanford or to Boalt Hall. Affirmative action gave me the chance to reach my highest aspirations….
It’s not clear why allowing Ms. Guerrero to “reach [her] highest aspirations” justifies denying that opportunity to the applicants to Stanford and Boalt Hall who would have been admitted if Ms. Guerrero’s ethnicity had not enabled her to displace them.
At the current point in Ms. Guerrero’s career, her highest aspirations have led her to the Equality Alliance of San Diego County.
The Equality Alliance’s purpose is to increase power in communities of color by networking racial justice activists to share resources and technical expertise, said Andrea Guerrero, the Alliance’s founder.
It will shed light on the widening gulf between voters and nonvoters in race, age and affluence, and will encourage people of color to register and to vote early in order to reverse the current trend toward disenfranchisement, she said.
So far, the coalition has registered “a couple of hundred” voters, Guerrero said….
Guerrero added that this is a trilingual campaign, with material in English, Spanish, and Tagalog.
Ms. Guerrero was recently the keynote speaker at California State University at San Marcos before an audience of “[m]ore than 20 community members, staffers and students” at
a forum hosted by Equality Alliance and the university chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens to hear information presented by the alliance on key trends among racial and ethnic groups, including disparities in education and political participation in the past decade.
According to Ms. Guerrero, the problems of the poor, the downtrodden, the people of color began with the end of affirmative action.
The end of affirmative action more than a decade ago was the beginning of unequal access to educational and economic opportunities for all communities of color, organizers of Equality Alliance of San Diego said Wednesday at Cal State San Marcos….
“When we took out affirmative action we took away a balancing mechanism,” said Andrea Guerrero, an attorney with Equality Alliance who was the keynote speaker of the forum.
Ms. Guerrero found trends in education the “most alarming.”
According to the data compiled by [the Equality Alliance], only 23 percent of blacks and 9 percent of Latinos age 25 or older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 40 percent of whites. Less than one-fifth of freshman admitted last fall into six of the nine University of California campuses were students of color, said Guerrero.
During her presentation, Guerrero urged immediate action is needed to address those statistics since two-thirds of California’s K-12 students in public schools are children of color. By 2050, eight of 10 students are projected to be of color.
I assume what Ms. Guerrero means by “immediate action” is the return of affirmative action. But if the degree gap that Ms. Guerrero is concerned to close can be reduced by affirmative action, could it not be eliminated altogether, and immediately, by simply requiring California schools to adjust their admission and graduation requirements and curricula in such a manner as to ensure that degrees are awarded to members of various racial and ethnic groups in proportion to their proportion of the population?
Ms. Guerrero’s career is a good example of one of the clearest effects (and in all probability one of the leading purposes) of race-based preferences: the creation of a cadre of workers to demand more race-based preferences.
