This is a bold new book that captures the fever of racial tensions in California politics since World War II. Building on two decades of scholarship on California politics, race, and direct democracy (ballot initiatives), the book moves the debate over racial politics to a new level, characterized by the use of the term “apartheid.” The race-based hierarchies and inequalities that have endured in California, the nation's largest and most ethnically diverse state, are supported by both the Democratic and Republican Parties and by political elites on both the ideological right and left. Beautifully written and a real page turner, the book compellingly argues that in California, “race” is an indispensible ideology and social prism extending to many realms of social, political and economic policy, including the state's budget problems.
While Racial Propositions may not pay enough attention to the role that demographic change and immigration have in shaping California's postwar politics, nor to the institutions that drive the extensive use of direct democracy, it extends the published literature by making novel, and potentially controversial, claims about the importance of race. Previous scholars understood a racial backlash on the part of the overwhelmingly white California electorate as an exception to the state's generally progressive and liberal political history. As this reviewer has asserted elsewhere (with Rodney Hero), in the 1990s a series of controversial ballot initiatives were passed by voters in California that adopted Official English laws (1986), banned social services for many immigrants (1994), repealed affirmative action (1996), ended bilingual education (1998), and toughened criminal sentencing (1994, 2000). But California voters also rejected fair employment protections in 1946, repealed antidiscrimination legislation in housing in 1964, and overturned school desegregation in 1972 and 1979. California's history includes the overturning of laws banning racial discrimination in state militia, employment, public accommodations, and housing, as well as laws banning interracial marriage and restricting landownership among Japanese Americans.
Daniel Martinez HoSang argues that a long history of racial ballot initiatives suggests that postwar California political history is characterized not by a white backlash but “by an unchanging and undifferentiated racial domination, with rhetorical shifts simply masking an enduring racial animus” (p. 2). The overwhelming support of ballot measures to roll back civil rights gains, according to the author, “is a relatively transparent expression of the ideological commitments” of white voters on these issues (p. 10). The subject matter is well trodden for scholars of California politics, but the thesis is new, and the book-length historical approach deepens this literature in important ways. This depth is especially valuable in chapters devoted to California initiatives regarding fair employment (1940s), fair housing (1960/1970s), and ending busing and school desegregation (1980s).
Building on the work of Roger Smith and Rodney Hero, HoSang argues that racial hierarchies are a defining feature of California politics, just as slavery and Jim Crow defined southern politics (as analyzed in the classic work of V. O. Key): “What if we imagine racism as a dynamic and evolving force, progressive rather than anachronistic, generative and fluid rather than conservative or static? What if we understand racial hierarchies to be sustained by a broad array of political actors, liberal as well as conservative, and even at times, by those placed outside the fictive bounds of whiteness? And finally, what if the central narratives of postwar liberalism—celebration of rights, freedom, opportunity, and equality—have ultimately sustained, rather than displaced, patterns of racial domination” (p. 2)?
For HoSang, both liberals and conservatives and the Democratic and the Republican Parties have nurtured a California political culture defined by racial hierarchies and economic inequality. While previous research by Stephen Nicholson, as well as Hero and myself, argued that direct democracy was used to play the “race card” for partisan ends, for HoSang racial politics transcend party. Despite Progressive political rhetoric, politicians of the blue and red stripe share a vested interest in maintaining racial inequalities.
HoSang's Racial Propositions is a double entendre by design. On one hand it refers to a set of ballot initiatives in postwar California that together tell one story. Chapters are devoted to fair employment (1945–60), fair housing (1960–72), busing and school desegregation (1982–90), illegal immigration (1994), affirmative action (1986–2000), bilingual education (1996–2000) and racial privacy initiatives (2001–3). Scholars know much less about the historical measures than those since the 1980s. The policies adopted at the ballot box are not the only outcomes, however, for ballot campaigns can shape the definition of public goods and establish the boundaries of public discourse. This is consistent with survey analysis published by James Wenzel, Todd Donovan, and Shawn Bowler showing a stigmatizing effect of ballot measures on minorities.
On the other hand, this book is about the meaning of race, and this is where its most important contribution lies. HoSang believes that in postwar California, political debates about the significance of race have been marked more by contradiction than by unity and coherence. Despite political organizations and movements using the rhetoric of equal opportunity, civil rights and equality of rights, HoSang argues that California is not the land of equality.
The chapter case studies explore the conflicts that gave rise to these ballot measures, profile the major political actors involved, and examine the discourse created by the initiative debates and mass media campaigns. Debates over race are evaluated in newspaper editorials, public debates, and neighborhood meetings, through interviews, and in analyses of campaign advertisements. The analysis of racial ballot measures focuses on the development of a white racial identity in tension with California's liberal discourse of rights, opportunity, and tolerance.
In Latinos and the US Political System (1992) and Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics (1998), Hero analyzes Latino immigration and ethnic diversity that stretches across the western states, mirroring the “black belt” counties made famous by Key's analysis of white voting patterns in the South. HoSang's volume extends the logic of Hero's work and Roger Smith's Civil Ideals (1997) with a focus on California, the nation's most populous state. But HoSang goes further.
Using the wide lens of history to study American culture and politics, HoSang contends that “apartheid” defines racial politics in postwar California. According to the author, apartheid should be seen as a set of policies sustaining racial hierarchy and segregation instead of only “open declarations of white supremacy and the policies and violence that sustained explicit segregation” in South Africa's post-1948 era (p. 7). In his words: “The ideological alchemy of apartheid—a belief in the inexorability of racial segregation and hierarchy—shaped the state's political culture, fixed the meaning of racial identities and group conflicts in particular ways, and constituted an everyday political common sense for diverse Californians, including those who resisted its demands and assignments” (p. 7).
Accordingly, even as formal laws for racial exclusion have waned, California's social system has cemented racial segregation. It is found in a $7 billion annual prison system with a quarter of a million Californians incarcerated, collapsed funding for government services (closed libraries, parks, and hospitals, a failing public school system—see Peter Shrag's Paradise Lost [1998]), and greater inequality between the affluent (who tend to be white) and the poor (who tend to be minority) than in any other state in the nation. It is notable that economic inequality lurks below the surface of the book's narrative, and some would argue that it is at least as important a driver of political inequality as is race (see Larry Bartel's Unequal Democracy [2008]).
If the book has a weakness, it is its failure sufficiently to draw upon, and to build on, the rich literature developed by scholars of direct democracy and race for understanding how demographic change in California over the past 40 years combined with a populist mechanism (ballot initiatives) to create an outlet for a white backlash against growing racial and ethnic populations, a thesis first introduced by Bruce Cain. HoSang modifies this thesis in important ways, in part saying that the backlash is not new. However, his argument is weakened by its inattention to important literature, much of which used survey data or aggregate data from the 50 states, which would have augmented the largely historical and qualitative analysis found in the book's pages.
Despite this shortcoming, this is an important book, and its claims about the importance of race above and beyond political culture, partisan politics, or the economy are supported with rich detail. The argument focuses on meaning and discourse, which is a breath of fresh air in a field traditionally focused on quantitative measures of politics. And it allows HoSang to make the courageous assertion that California is the land of “blue state racism”—the title of the concluding chapter.
Is the author correct that California's politics represent apartheid? Or is this stepping too far? Have other states not adopted similar ballot measures as California, including voting to end affirmative action in Washington State, end bilingual education in Arizona, or adopt Official English in Colorado? Are there limitations to single-state studies that avoid analyzing policies across the 50 states? Rather than apartheid, is California struggling to balance the demands of white, Latino, African American, and Asian American populations in the new millennium, as argued by Mark Baldassare? Bowler, Nicholson, and Gary Segura have argued evidence that the racial ballot propositions mobilized Latino voters, leading to a Democratic partisan realignment in California. Is there a silver lining to California's racial politics? Others, like Zoltan Hajnal, Elisabeth Gerber, and Hugh Louch, argue that while California minorities lose on racial ballot initiatives, they tend to win most of the time in direct democracy elections on issues of taxation, education, and more. And is not the California legislature as much to blame as the voters, as slavery arose in the South without the help of direct democracy? Is the election of America's first African American president, Barack Obama, evidence that, despite a history of racial tensions, America is evolving? California, it is worth underscoring, was necessary to seal Obama's presidential victory.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the argument presented in Racial Propositions, students and scholars have much to learn from this rich and thought-provoking book. Following in the footsteps of Key, Smith, and Hero, HoSang moves the debate about race and politics to a new level.
