MINORITIES HAVE GROWING VISIBILITY IN PROPOSITION CAMPAIGNS

African Americans make up only about 7 percent of California's
population, but you wouldn't know that from watching the Proposition
19 campaign. The public face of the campaign to stop the marijuana
legalization initiative has been Bishop Ron Allen, a prominent black
preacher, while one of the most visible backers of the yes side has
been California NAACP head Alice Huffman.

Meanwhile, the Prop. 23 campaign has been lining up African-American
and Hispanic Chambers of Commerce in their effort to suspend AB 32,
California's law to fight global warming. The campaign recently did a
photo opp outside Texas Mexican Restaurant in Sacramento featuring
owner Griselda Barajas.

On Monday, a new coalition against Prop. 23 was unveiled. Communities
United Against the Dirty Energy Prop was partially designed to bring
more minority voices into the effort against the initiative. Its
being run out of the Ella Baker Center on Human Rights in Oakland,
named after the famed black civil rights leader.

These are probably the two most prominent examples. But it seems
clear that in this fall's initiative campaigns there has been a major
push by all sides to put faces of color in central roles.

"People of color are numerically more than 50 percent of the people
of California, and they are 40 percent of the electorate," said Ian
Kim, the campaign manager for the Communities United effort out of
the Ella Baker Center. "Latinos themselves are over 20 percent of the
electorate, and that's growing. In the last 10 years, the number of
Latino voters has doubled. For any statewide campaign, it's become
more important to know what voters of color are going to think."

One thing a lot of these people were thinking two years ago was that
they had been ignored. Nowhere was this more stark than in the
Proposition 8 campaign. While there has been controversy over the
exact numbers, it is clear that a majority of African-American and
Latino voters approved the bid to stop the same-sex marriages that
were then taking place in California.

Both of these groups are lower income and more likely to attend
church than the general population, two key factors when it came to
predicting how people would vote. But the no campaign was also widely
criticized as being run by middle-class whites out of the Bay Area
and Los Angeles, with little or no outreach to minority communities
until it was too late. In the meantime, a group of socially
conservative black preachers set the tone with fiery rallies
promoting the measure.

Proposition 19 may be close, and partisans on both side know that
every vote counts. Each campaign set out early to stake out a
pro-minority position, long before the average voter was even engaged.

For months, the Yes on 19 side has been promoting a study that shows
that African-Americans are arrested for marijuana at much higher
rates than whites - a trend that exists across many years and in
every single county in the state.

"When you look at who we're putting in prison, its three to one
blacks and Latinos, but whites use more drugs more often," said Dale
Sky Jones, a spokeswoman for Yes on 19 and executive chancellor of
Oaksterdam. They could have made an even stronger historical case,
she said, except that many crime statistics counted Latinos as white
until well into the 90s.

"How many of those 'white' people were actually white?" Jones asked.
"It's been a longstanding issue."

In fact, she said, they conceived of the campaign as a civil rights
issue long before Huffman got involved. Instead of having to go out
and get minority support, she said, Huffman and many largely-Latino
labor unions came to them instead.

When that arrest rates study came out at the end of June, it appeared
to spark a rhetorical war between Huffman and Allen for the soul of
African-American voters.

"Alice Huffman and the California NAACP don't speak for the minority
community," Allen said, when approached at a No on 19 rally at the
Capitol on Tuesday being led by the operators of several medical
marijuana dispensaries. In his many public appearances, Allen - a
former drug addict himself, who claims that a pot addiction led him
to cocaine - has laid out a scenario of pot shops littering minority
communities the way liquor stores do now.

Anita Mengel, the main spokeswoman for the California Jobs
Initiative, as the Yes on 19 campaign is known, said the campaign
didn't "make a conscious decision" to specifically court minority
voters in particular. But their outreach to chambers of commerce and
business groups led them to numerous black and Latino groups, for
whom the issue of jobs and the faltering economy are major concerns.
The California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce has endorsed the measure.

"They're very concerned about jobs," Mengel said. "They're also
concerned about how rising energy costs will hurt small businesses
that are minority owned. If you take a look at our endorsement list,
you will see a large number of not only Latino and African American
groups but other minority groups."

Those who want to keep AB 32, meanwhile, have been trying to brand
the Yes on 23 with the mostly-white faces of Texas oil executives -
particularly those of Valero and Tesoro, who have given a combined
$5.6 million.

"From our point of view, anybody can say that," said Bruce Mirken, a
spokesman for the Greenlining Institute, which is a member of
Communities United. "But the notion that a couple of Texas oil
companies would be spending millions of dollars to benefit minority
communities in California does not pass the smell test."