Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences

With his campaigns against race preferences in California and Washington, Ward Connerly altered America's racial landscape. Now, in Creating Equal, he tells the human story behind this struggle - a story of a man's courage in enduring slander and even possible violence in an effort to point America toward the promised land of racial reconciliation.
By turns amusing and sobering, and always stubbornly honest, Connerly gives us dramatic vignettes of Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson, George W. Bush and Rupert Murdoch, Al Gore and Bob Dole, and other political and cultural figures he has met during his unfinished journey. But his book is ultimately about America's racial divide and how to close it.

The University of California regent who got that institution to dump affirmative action and then spearheaded successful California and Washington ballot initiatives overturning those states' affirmative action policies explains himself very well. For openers, he recounts a group discussion of affirmative action with President Clinton, then backtracks to a brief autobiography stressing the poverty and loss of parents out of which he grew to become a successful postgraduate collegian, state housing official, and businessman--all without the benefit of affirmative action. His famous public-policy activities are his main concern, though, and he discusses them as straightforwardly as he does his earlier life. Connerly treats his many adversaries humanely, expressing discontent and bewilderment with their actions but never smearing them as he has been smeared (as an "oreo" and worse). Better than his equanimity is his demonstration that U. of C. minority admissions have not plummeted and that the university's outreach to poor minority high-schoolers--the untrumpeted companion policy to quashing affirmative action--is going great guns. This is top-drawer "right-wing" apologetics. Ray Olson