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When the main attraction at last Tuesday evening’s UC Berkeley Proposition 54 debate didn’t show—University of California Regent Ward Connerly—it was still business as usual at the packed session in Booth Auditorium at Boalt Hall. 

Proposition 54 is the Oct. 7 initiative that would ban the collection of most race data by California government agencies. Connerly, its author and principal sponsor, dropped out of the Boalt Hall debate at the last minute for health reasons. 

A generally polite, racially diverse crowd of students reserved their toughest questions and occasional hisses and audible gasps for Connerly’s pro-54 replacement, Justin Jones, Director of Policy and Planning for the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI). 

Both Jones and his debate opponent, California attorney Eva Paterson, are African-American. 

Some 75 to 100 students were turned away from the packed crowd at the auditorium for lack of space. A rally to protest Connerly’s presence at UC Berkeley and to demand his removal or resignation as UC Regent had been planned by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration (BAMN) to take place outside the debate. Students at the rally accused Connerly of ducking the debate. 

But an assistant at Connerly’s ACRI in Sacramento said Connerly was asked by his doctor yesterday to return for what the assistant called “routine tests to check on his heart” after the 64-year-old businessman had earlier taken a treadmill test. The assistant would not elaborate, but characterized the return hospital visit as “not serious” and “not newsworthy,” and said that Connerly was not hospitalized. 

During the debate itself Paterson, a Boalt Hall graduate and a frequent debate opponent of Connerly’s, argued that the most damaging effect of Prop. 54 would be the limitation on the government’s collection of race-based health data. 

While the initiative would allow the classification of medical research subjects and patients, Paterson said “that would leave a large gap in medical data. We know right now, for example, that the largest consumers of cigarettes in our society are Vietnamese men. The portion of our population most prone to suicide are young Filipino women. We also know that white citizens are more prone to certain diseases than other racial groups. 

“Disease is not color blind,” he said. “Proposition 54 will severely limit discovering the causes of diseases in different races.” Paterson also quoted former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop as saying that “lives will be lost” if Prop. 54 passes. 

Jones dismissed the health concerns, calling it a “phony issue” that was already adequately addressed by the health data exemptions in the proposition. As for other concerns expressed by Prop. 54 opponents, he said flatly that “Proposition 54 will end racial profiling.” 

Connerly’s stand-in argued that the collection of race-based data by government agencies should end because “so long as we continue to focus on race in our data, the more we are going to be obsessed and attached to race as a concept. For the last hundred years, we’ve been tracking the education of students by race in order to determine why there is a racial gap in test scores. 

“And yet in all that time, that gap has widened. The current plan isn’t working. We need to do something different.” Asked by an audience member what he would do to replace current plans to address racial disparities, Jones said, “That’s a tough question. I can’t tell you right now what that plan should be. We’ve got to change people’s hearts in some way.” 

The Boalt Hall debate was sponsored by the Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy.