For Immediate Release
May 12, 2020
Livingston, New Jersey: Taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Assembly Committee on Public Employment and Retirement in the California Legislature passed Assembly Constitutional Amendment NO. 5 (ACA-5) on May 5th, 2020, without adequate consideration of the opposition’s views. The Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) vehemently opposes this divisive amendment and calls upon all Asian-American and other organizations to join our national alliance to stop this renewed attempt to reinstitute racial preferences.
ACA-5 is explicitly aimed at repealing Proposition 209 which outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in its public institutions. ACA-5’s implementation will result in a clear violation of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Misled or ill-informed, over 130 organizations have endorsed ACA-5. Once codified, the amendment will set a corrosive precedent for a wave of legislative and bureaucratic attacks on equal treatment and civil rights in other parts of the country. Since mid-March, AACE has worked with California-based organizations to counter the ACA-5 campaign and formed a national alliance under the name— “Equal Rights for All Californians”. To defeat the discriminative ACA-5, we must further expand this unified front.
Henceforth, we call upon all AACE’s partner organizations and other concerned groups to join this national alliance. Both our constitutional rights and our children’s equal education opportunities are on the line as ACA-5 pits racial groups against each other at the expense of true equality. It is time we unite together!
Please fill out the form to join our national alliance:
MEDIA CONTACT:
Dr. Wenyuan Wu, telephone: (786) 393-8028, email: [email protected].
Ms. Swann Lee, telephone: (617) 906-6380, email: [email protected].
About the AACE: www.asianamericanforeducation.org
Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) is a non-political, nonprofit, grassroots national organization, the proven leader in fighting for Asian-American children’s equal educational rights. On May 15, 2015, the founders of AACE united 64 Asian-American organizations and jointly filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to request that they conduct investigations into Harvard University’s discriminatory admissions practices against Asian-American applicants. As the largest joint action taken by Asian-American communities over the last few decades, this complaint is now being investigated by the Justice Department. Over the years, we have advanced the cause of equal education rights for the Asian-American community. In July 2018, the federal government adopted our policy recommendations by rescinding Obama era guidance that promoted racial balancing and acquiesced to racial discrimination in college admissions.