Media Intervention Initiative
The Media Intervention Initiative Project is designed to train and empower civil rights advocates and their supporters with the latest informational and communications expertise needed to defend affirmative action in the media, electoral and community organizing arenas. It utilizes the information, strategies, and partnerships generated at our recent affirmative action outreach efforts to challenge misconceptions that undermine affirmative action. In so doing, we seek to promote policies that ensure genuine equality of opportunity for racial minorities and women. One outcome of this project was the collaborative cross-sectoral information of a speakers’ bureau to intervene and defend affirmative action in the anti-preference 2006 ballot campaign in
Michigan .
From September 2004 to December 2006, we were able to carry out a ground-breaking and influential campaign educating the general public about the issues at stake in the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), an anti-affirmative action referendum championed by Ward Connerly, a crusader for similar referenda elsewhere, particularly
California , which passed Proposition 209 in 1996.
Although the MCRI ultimately passed in
Michigan , some of the exit poll data is encouraging. While whites voted to end affirmative action in numbers very similar to their percentage in California , Black support for ending affirmative action went down from 26% in California to only 14% in
Michigan . While we obviously cannot take full credit for the disparity in numbers, our Initiative in
Michigan , which focused on de-marginalizing communities of color in the affirmative action debate, were absolutely unprecedented. The feedback we received, especially from Black and minority communities, indicated that our work served to address serious gaps both in the larger campaign to oppose MCRI and in many people’s understanding of affirmative action. At the outset of the campaign, Black voters expressed a great deal of confusion over the deceptive language of the MCRI; however, when Election Day arrived, they overwhelmingly voted to preserve affirmative action in their state.
Some conservative commentators will interpret the fact that white Michiganders voted for MCRI in similar proportion to white Californians as an indication that white Americans are not a persuadable audience on racial justice issues. We believe, however, that the failure of the mainstream, anti-MCRI campaign in
Michigan is indicative of a failure in tactics, not a sign of the futility of engaging with white voters. The majority of white voters will not be persuaded to support affirmative action simply by recasting the issue as one centering on white women; the results from California and
Michigan plainly illustrate this. Instead, the failures in those states show the continually unmet need for new research on opinion-shifting arguments and education that convince white Americans about the ongoing burden of – and opportunity to dismantle – racism in this country. The defeat in Michigan should be a rallying cry for shifting the paradigms of the affirmative action debate from those deployed against MCRI, which proved deficient, to those that utilize affirmative action as a way to open up larger debates on the state of race in 21st century
America . Towards this end, we have ambitious plans for continuing the Media Intervention project on and for the advancement of racial justice.
Under the themes of the Media Intervention Project, we have been co-sponsors and principle organizers of the following major conferences and community activities over the past years: “Defending Affirmative Action: Confronting Distortions in the Public Debate,” March 27th - 28th at
Columbia
Law
School , 2003; “The Affirmative Action Strategy Summit: Reclaiming the High Ground 50 Years after Brown." April 23, 2004; "Promoting Equal Opportunity Post Grutter: Affirmative Action Strategy Summit II and Litigation Meeting,” October 14-15, 2004 in Washington D.C.; and the “Research Consortium And Policy Initiative,” October 16, 2004; Affirmative Action Leadership Training and Community Mobilization Workshops, 2005-2005 Detroit, MI; The Negril Social Justice Writers Retreat, Jamaica, 2006; the collaborative writer of affirmative action educational materials and toolkits during the years of 2005 and 2006; a two-week series presentation at the “Michael Eric Dyson Radio Show.”
Our cosponsors in this domain are the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in Washington D.C. , Americans for a Fair Chance, The American Civil Liberties Union, Fulfilling the Dream Fund, Professor Claude Steele’s Center for Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at
Stanford
University , the Deer Creek Foundation and President Lee Bollingers’ Office at
Columbia
University
.
