Californians, Vote Yes on Prop 16

Banning any consideration of race, gender or ethnicity in public university admissions and public contracting was a mistake with big consequences.

By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Oct. 27, 2020, 7:46 p.m. ET

Black and Latino people have been hit hardest by America’s recent one-two punch of public health and economic crises. They’ve been hospitalized for Covid-19 at quadruple the rate of white Americans. Their businesses have struggled to get the support they requested from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program. As of August, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was nearly double that of white Americans.

Amid these widening disparities, California voters are weighing a measure that could be a big help to women, Black and Latino students and business owners. Proposition 16 aims to reverse Proposition 209, a measure that California passed 24 years ago banning consideration of race, gender or ethnicity in public university admissions and public contracting. California was the first state to try to ban affirmative action, and others — including Michigan, Arizona and Washington — later followed suit.

Recent research reveals the far-reaching effects of Prop 209. Black and Latino enrollment in the University of California system declined immediately. The measure most likely deterred more than 1,000 Black and Latino students from even applying to the University of California system each year, according to research by Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Berkeley. The research describes a cascade effect in which the Black and Latino students who were rejected from elite schools then enrolled in less selective universities, crowding out others and precluding some students from attending college at all.

The impact of the ban on affirmative action has been particularly visible in the medical field. Latinos comprise 40 percent of California’s population but roughly only 6 percent of its practicing physicians. Drs. Gloria Sanchez and David Hayes-Bautista, from the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, attribute this shortfall largely to Proposition 209, which substantially cut the number of Latino U.C. medical school graduates. During the pandemic, as Spanish-speaking Latino patients have been sickened at high rates, they have also sometimes struggled to find physicians who can communicate with them.

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