The Real Defenders of Civil Rights!

As you may know, for nearly three decades, CFER Executive Vice President Gail Heriot has been working faithfully and diligently to advance equality and civil rights. Professor Heriot served in leadership roles for three successful civil rights campaigns: Yes on Prop. 209 (1996), No on Prop. 16 (2020), and No on ACA 7 (2024).

Recently, Professor Heriot, in her capacity as a U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner, joined Commissioner Peter Kirsanow in a compelling letter to U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. In the letter, Professor Heriot and Mr. Kirsanow asked Congress to reform college accreditation process by amending existing law to prohibit accrediting agencies from mandating schools to implement diversity requirements and racial preferences. You can read the letter here and a Wall Street Journal report on it here.

Professor Heriot’s legislative proposal addresses accreditors, an important pro-diversity and anti-equality player in the “complex webs of state and federal oversight and grant-making authority.” It seeks to remove the undue pressure placed by accreditors on colleges and universities to conform to the woke ideology.

In the coming days, CFER will work alongside Professor Heriot to promote her civil-rights proposal through awareness building and media outreach. As we have shown in CFER’s track record, since our founding, we have pursued the real civil rights of equal access and equal protection on a tiny budget (between $250k and 350k every year). Because the vast majority of our donations come from grassroots support, we pinch the penny and spend every dollar with caution and care.

By sharp contrast, when you look at another "civil rights" organization which had $16,797,759 in revenue, $15,888,677 in expenses, $909,082 in net income and $47,246,990 in net assets (from its latest Form 990 in 2023), aren't you wondering what they are doing to advance civil rights? How has Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), a 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1969, been using its $47.2-million portfolio to further civil rights for Americans of Asian descent?

CAA received funding from the federal government (Biden) and major progressive foundations for woke causes unrelated to civil rights

If civil rights are fundamentally individual rights of equal access/protection, CAA is focused on political priorities antithetical to civil rights. Its main operations, lushly funded by public taxpayer money and private foundation grants, perfectly synchronize with evolving demands of progressivism.

In 2024, CAA was awarded a $2-million-dolar federal grant by the U.S. Department of Justice to carry out a three-year project for “stop AAPI hate community-based approaches to prevent and address hate crimes and/or hate incidents.” Does CAA really care about the real discrimination Asian Americans have experienced in K-12 and higher education and the blatant violation of their civil rights as individual Americans as a result? No, they don’t. The agenda they push is all about systemic racism, a flawed political theory with bad consequences impacting the society.

CAA has supported “equitable” criminal justice reforms by endorsing Prop. 47 in 2014, a notorious proposal contributing to a statewide crime spree. To this end, CAA has secured funding from Libra, a grantmaking organization that “prioritizes multi-year, unrestricted grants to frontline, BIPOC-led organizations,” to sponsor the “Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC).” APSC organizes anti-deportation campaigns, culturally relevant reentry programs and Ethnic Studies lessons for prisoners.

In 1996, it participated in the campaign coalition against the California Civil Rights Initiative, which brought the passage of Prop. 209, our nation’s first statewide constitutional ban on government preferences. Luckily, the campaign failed. But CAA prides itself for playing “a lead role in coordinating opposition (against Prop. 209).”

In the 28 years since then, CAA has devoted itself to systematically sabotaging the constitutional principle of equal protection. It has campaigned for SCA 5 – a failed proposal to repeal the higher education portion of Prop. 209 in 2014, and then campaigned for Prop. 16 – the ill-fated blanket repeal of Prop. 209 in 2020. Ironically, in a televised debate on Prop. 16 four years ago, two CAA representatives accused CFER of “taking dark money.” In reality, CAA is a multi-million-dollar grift, a large portion of which has unknown origins.

What is dark money? The money CAA received in the tens of millions but failed to report in compliance with the IRS guidelines. For all 501(c)(3) organizations, IRS requires them to report on schedule B about contributions collected more than $5000 that year. However, they never reported. For instance, in 2023, when the organization reported $16.8 million in revenue and $47.2 million in net assets, its IRS filing shows $10.4 million of the revenue as “all other contributions, gifts, grants and similar amounts” with no further detail. CAA has refused to disclose or self-report major donors, classifying such information as “restricted.” Adding in what we’ve found independently, 99% of its 2023 revenue was unaccounted for! Speaking of dark money?!

The shocking story of CAA is a somber reminder of Eric Hoffer’s famous quibble, that “(e)very great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” For CFER, CAA (and many other similar grifts) is a cautionary tale. CFER will stay devoted to the greater principle of equality – the true cornerstone of civil rights- while fend off greed and dogmatism. We can’t do this without grassroots support from you.