Special Affirmative Action Section

FOR Washington state legislator Scott Smith, preferential policies hit close to home. In 1991, he and his wife, Leslie, joined hundreds of others in applying to the police academy. He scored 18th to her 287th. She got a job. He didn’t. “I started asking a couple of friends, How could this happen? and they said that’s what’s called affirmative action,” he recalls. “And it seemed immoral.” Now Smith is leading the campaign for the Washington Civil Rights Initiative to abolish state race and gender preferences.

Ed Blum and his wife, Lark, saw another side of affirmative action when he ran for Congress from Houston in 1992. “During an entire year of blockwalking,” he says, “we realized that blacks and whites and Hispanics who literally lived across the street from each other were put in different districts based on their race. It wasn’t unusual for garage apartments to be separated from the regular homes. I was a garden-variety businessman learning how bizarrely these lines had been drawn.” Blum went on to mount legal challenges to race-based districting and school admissions. Now he has launched the Houston Civil Rights Initiative, which will be on the ballot this November.

About the Author

Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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FOR Washington state legislator Scott Smith, preferential policies hit close to home. In 1991, he and his wife, Leslie, joined hundreds of others in applying to the police academy. He scored 18th to her 287th. She got a job. He didn’t. “I started asking a couple of friends, How could this happen? and they said that’s what’s called affirmative action,” he recalls. “And it seemed immoral.” Now Smith is leading the campaign for the Washington Civil Rights Initiative to abolish state race and gender preferences.

Ed Blum and his wife, Lark, saw another side of affirmative action when he ran for Congress from Houston in 1992. “During an entire year of blockwalking,” he says, “we realized that blacks and whites and Hispanics who literally lived across the street from each other were put in different districts based on their race. It wasn’t unusual for garage apartments to be separated from the regular homes. I was a garden-variety businessman learning how bizarrely these lines had been drawn.” Blum went on to mount legal challenges to race-based districting and school admissions. Now he has launched the Houston Civil Rights Initiative, which will be on the ballot this November.