Racism returns to California, from UCLA to Proposition 50

The U.S. Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit against the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, alleging that the medical school continues to use race as a criterion in admissions.

California’s Proposition 209 made the use of race illegal in admissions to public universities in 1996, and the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit in 2023 with its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The Trump administration has also clamped down on discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies and departments at universities, both private and public.

But many universities have sought to continue racial discrimination under different names and guises.

And it has been an open secret for years that California universities have tried to find proxies for race that could fly under the radar.

The partisan officials who have drawn California’s new congressional maps are continuing that disgraceful tradition, using race as a proxy for political identity.

The fact that these maps were ratified by voters in Proposition 50 should not save them at the U.S. Supreme Court, based on precedent.

Two lawsuits are challenging the maps adopted by Prop. 50, both alleging violations of different parts of the Constitution. 

The first of the two cases to reach the Supreme Court, Tangipa v. Newsom, arrived there on a rocket, after an accelerated mini-trial last December.

The plaintiffs in Tangipa claimed that the state officials who drew the new map did so with the specific intent of grouping people by race. That, the plaintiffs said, was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — the classic basis for claims against racial discrimination.

But a three-judge federal district court ruled against the claim that the map was enacted with illegal racial predominance.

The federal court also said the Prop. 50 referendum granted absolution to any illegal racial tactics baked into the map.

Put another way, the court ruled that the fact that voters approved the maps meant that they didn’t violate the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Democrats rejoiced, anticipating victory in five Congressional seats, with the goal of flipping control of the House.

Not so fast. 

In 1964, the Supreme Court held explicitly that a referendum could not absolve an unconstitutional legislative map.

The Supreme Court should decide that what they said in 1964 applies to California in 2026.

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Enter the second lawsuit against Prop. 50 maps, Noyes v. Newsom. (I am representing Noyes, along with the Public Interest Legal Foundation). 

The Noyes lawsuit is based on the Fifteenth Amendment, not the Fourteenth.

Ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits any election law designed or purposed “on account of race.”

Noyes argues that the architects of California’s new maps might not have acted with “racial predominance” to violate the Fourteenth Amendment, but instead acted with “racial purpose” to violate the Fifteenth Amendment. 

Illegal predominance in the Fourteenth Amendment and illegal purpose in the Fifteenth might sound similar.

But imagine a track star approaching a “predominance” hurdle that is six feet and a “purpose” hurdle that is just three feet. Simply put, a predominance claim is much harder to prove than a purpose claim.

Any racial purpose violates the Fifteenth Amendment, and that’s what the Noyes case is about.

How did the map drawers have a racial purpose in designing Prop. 50?

Let’s count the ways.  

For starters, the Prop. 50 map deliberately created racially guaranteed districts in Los Angeles, Districts 37 and 43. They were designed with racial tools to ensure that black candidates would always win those districts. 

It gets worse.

Prop. 50’s map drawers surgically avoided adding too many Latino voters to these black influence districts. That ensured there would never be a contested primary between black and Latino candidates.

And it gets even worse. 

The Prop. 50 map drawers deliberately created sixteen Latino districts by applying demographic data to draw districts around tight bands of Latino majorities between 52% and 55%, over and over, across California.

The primary goal might have been political, not racial — i.e. simply to elect more Democrats.

However, the tools used were racial majorities. That violates the Fifteenth Amendment. 

The Fifteenth Amendment is the three-foot hurdle. 

Moreover, an expert in the Noyes case drew a map that created five more Democrat seats without sorting by race. 

It wasn’t politics Newsom and the Democrats were after; it was racial politics.

I filed a brief at the Supreme Court reminding the justices of their own past rulings that a public vote cannot absolve racially motivated redistricting.

If a referendum could ratify racism, every Jim Crow vote denial scheme in history could have simply been put to public vote.

Approval of Prop. 50 cannot absolve an unconstitutional congressional map.

That is why the Supreme Court must set Proposition 50 aside.

It’s well past time for California to move past race.

J. Christian Adams is President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.