I HAVE A SCHEME

By Jack E. White

Memo to Jay Leno, David Letterman, Bill Maher and Dennis Miller: Watch your backs--a new political humorist has arrived on the scene who is funnier than you'll ever be. His name is Ward Connerly.

For those who haven't yet caught his hilarious shtick, Connerly is the Sacramento businessman and University of California regent who last year spearheaded the campaign for Proposition 209. Maybe it's just my twisted sense of humor, but Connerly has been cracking me up ever since he agreed to chair that anti-affirmative-action crusade. I laughed out loud when I heard that in 1991 this man who says that his hatred for racial preferences is so intense it "seeps out of every pore" had registered his consulting firm as a black-owned business in order to keep state contracts worth more than $1 million (he says a state law compelled him to do so). And I found it wryly amusing that Prop 209's organizers picked Connerly as field marshal of their war on race consciousness precisely because of his race. The right-wing ideologues who crafted the California Civil Rights Initiative knew it was doomed if only resentful white guys seemed to support it. So they aggressively recruited Connerly to put a black face on the issue. Even so, last week Connerly told me that the Prop 209ers were interested chiefly in his fund-raising ability and that his race was only "in the back of their minds."

But the chuckles I got out of that were nothing compared with the belly laughs I experienced when Connerly chose Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday to announce the creation of a new organization to take his anti-affirmative-action show on the road--in honor of the slain civil rights leader. "Dr. King personifies the quest for a color-blind society," Connerly explains, "and I felt that it would be a great symbol to give birth to an organization that wants the nation to resume that journey on the birthday of the man who symbolizes it." Connerly claims he has the support of "a lot of people, black and white, who marched with Dr. King, who now say they really don't agree with the direction in which we're going." But the only civil rights leader he names is Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. Before his metamorphosis to Republican conservatism during the Nixon era, Innis' main accomplishment was transforming core into a black nationalist cult so extreme it tried to rally support for Idi Amin. I could barely stop giggling.

King's family and associates, of course, don't see the humor in Connerly's misappropriation of King's vision. In fact, his namesake, Martin Luther King III, is starting his own organization to fight Connerly every step of the way. This is part of the King family's long-running struggle to gain financial control over his writings and speeches (which includes a recent multimillion-dollar pact with Time Warner, this magazine's owner). But the real issue here is not money but whether people who oppose nearly everything King stood for have the right to assert that his corpse is marching in their parade.

As former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young points out, Connerly and his ilk quote King on a highly selective basis. They tout the passage from the "I have a dream" speech about judging his children not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But they ignore an earlier passage in which King angrily declared, "When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'" The misappropriators want to forget that when he was killed in 1968, King was organizing the Poor People's Campaign whose goal was to expand greatly the Federal Government's role in eradicating poverty. King, for all his commitment to nonviolence, was a radical advocate of social change who deliberately disrupted the status quo in pursuit of racial justice, not a milquetoast advocate of Hallmark Card-style brotherhood between the races.

And yet, Connerly staunchly insists that he "will not run from the right to use Dr. King's words as I would use Lincoln or Jefferson or Kennedy. Our opponents haven't cornered the market on goodness, and they need to be challenged." He claims that despite his opposition to racial preferences, he believes in affirmative-action outreach programs and efforts to upgrade public schools in poor neighborhoods. "What I want to do is refashion the concept of affirmative action, grab on to those things that I think the American people will support." In short, Connerly believes affirmative action must be destroyed in order to save it. That's a pretty good joke, to be sure, but it's no laughing matter.