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“I’ve run into instances in work when dealing with a city, and we’re asking questions about consultants or contractors, and a lot of times they [can’t give the] answer because of the anti-affirmative action ban,” says Charity Marcus. She’s a consultant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who works with cities, mapping out strategies for economic and community development.
In 2012, the Oklahoma legislature passed a ballot initiative known as the Oklahoma Affirmative Action Ban, or State Question 759. The amendment passed by over 230,000 votes. The first attempt to ban affirmative action in Oklahoma came in 2008, but the validity of the signatures for a ballot measure were questioned. In 2011, Republican state senator Rob Johnson authored the resolution. The measure was modeled after affirmative action bans in other states (currently nine states have affirmative action bans).
Unintended consequences
Jennifer Jezek, who is Native American, is the president and CEO of York Electronic Systems in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. She says that she first learned about the ban around 2019 while serving on the Oklahoma Governor’s Minority Business Council.
Jezek says that when she was researching legislation to create the Oklahoma Supplier Diversity Initiative, she was told to “tread lightly” by associates at the Department of Commerce because of the ban. She dug deeper and had conversations with local attorneys who had worked on cases that were used as precedent for the law. Eventually, she ended up speaking to some of the original sponsors of the bill. State Senator Johnson and State Representative Leslie Osborn introduced the bill. Cosponsors of the measure included John Trebilcock, Mike Jackson, and David Derby. Jezek says she was told that the original bill was recommended by the legislature “in an attempt to avoid bias in college admissions.” But the unintended consequences, she says, were in state government hiring and public contracting.
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