BERKELEY, Calif. - Michigan has a question for California: Was it a good idea to prohibit, as your voters did in 1996, the use of race- and gender-based affirmative action by public schools and government agencies for hiring, contracting and admissions decisions?

Ten years ago, the issue raged in California just as it does now in Michigan in the run-up to the Nov. 7 election and a vote on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, or MCRI.

Like backers of the MCRI, proponents of the nearly identical California Civil Rights Initiative, known as Proposition 209, promised a pathway to a colorblind society. Its opponents forecast an end to opportunity for women and minorities.

A decade later, some results are tangible: fewer African Americans at elite state universities and an apparent reduction in cost for road contracts awarded without consideration of race and gender.

"In a heartbeat," said Ward Connerly, the former University of California regent who led the campaign to pass 209. Connerly is also a principal organizer of the MCRI campaign.

But Eva Paterson, who heads a coalition dedicated to doing away with 209, said she thinks that California voters someday will realize their mistake.

After its enactment, black and Hispanic enrollment declined sharply at the University of California system's elite schools - Berkeley and UCLA.

At UCLA, this fall's freshman class includes just 96 African Americans (about 2 percent) - a 30-year low. Other reports have documented drops in minority and female faculty on some campuses and suggested a decline in the number of government contracts awarded to minority- and female-owned businesses.

But other research shows that overall minority enrollment at the elite schools has stabilized at lower levels, that overall minority enrollment is at or above pre-209 levels and that system-wide, California was among the national leaders in degrees awarded to nonwhite students.

Still, African Americans, 6 percent of California's population, did not keep pace with the increases in the attainment of college degrees by white, Asian or Hispanic Californians during the last 10 years.

On a broader scale, many of the traditional measures of progress - income, educational attainment, poverty rates - show that progress for California's minorities and women has outpaced that of whites and men during the last decade.

The median income for women rose slightly more than that for men between 1995 and 2003. The growth in median household income for blacks, Hispanics and Asians between 1995 and 2004 was significantly higher than it was for whites.

Hans Johnson, an economist at the Public Policy Institute of California, urged caution in linking the passage of 209 to those changes. The ban applied only to public schools and government agencies, Johnson said. In the larger, private California economy, affirmative action remains common - as it would in Michigan if the MCRI were adopted.

Deborah Reed, another researcher and a former associate professor at the University of Michigan, said economic trends for all groups in California were positive in the post-209 decade.

Justin Marion, a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said he is reasonably confident that 209 has saved taxpayers money on road building.

Marion analyzed spending after 1996, when state and local road projects no longer required that a portion of all contracts be set aside for businesses owned by minorities and women. Since federal projects were still subject to set-asides, it was possible to test the effect on cost.

Supporters of affirmative action argue that the premium for taxpayers is small and offset by greater opportunities for historically disadvantaged people. But measuring the effectiveness of affirmative-action programs and the impact of ending them has been tough.

The Discrimination Research Center, an affirmative-action advocacy organization founded in Berkeley in 1998, found fewer women in construction trades and attributed that to 209. But the authors cited shortcomings in data and acknowledged that even post-209 "women are better represented in the construction industry in California than nationally."

Whites and African Americans, both shrinking portions of the population, are also a declining portion of the state workforce; Hispanics and Asians, both increasing, occupy a larger share.

"The weight of the law was no longer in favor of using preferences. That is an attitudinal change that may take decades to be absorbed. But it's in the fabric of everyday life now."

If 209 produced culture shock anywhere, it was in the San Francisco Bay area, on and around the campus at the University of California-Berkeley. The school, one of the nation's most highly regarded public universities, was ground zero for 209 opposition and has been the incubator for the nascent repeal movement.

The number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at Berkeley fell sharply after 209 passed - from 7.2 percent of all freshmen in 1995 to 3.2 percent three years later.

Since then, the number of black incoming freshmen has remained low, but Hispanic enrollment has returned to its former level at Berkeley and UCLA, and has grown system-wide. Opponents of 209 contend, however, that both blacks and Hispanics remain underrepresented.

At the University of California-Berkeley, students can enroll in a "Prop. 209 Project" section of Ethnic Studies. Its objective: develop a strategy to repeal 209. In April, the university hosted a daylong symposium called Overturning 209. Organizers called California's post-209 condition one of crisis.

Berkeley students, in fact, reflect the attitudes of many Californians on the issues of race, gender, affirmative action and Proposition 209: They are of mixed minds.

Julian Thomas, an African American from San Diego who graduated this year with a degree in biology, said he sometimes felt isolated as a black student.

He also experienced the sting of bigotry, including once from a white female classmate who passed him on the sidewalk off campus and failed to recognize him. She clutched her purse tighter. Later, when she fell behind in the laboratory, she asked him for help.

Race relations are not a dominant issue in their lives on or off campus, said Thomas, 22, and his companion, 26-year-old Michael Hunter, also an African American and graduating senior. They would have voted against 209 and said it almost certainly did some damage. But they agreed that it also focused attention on the need to improve California public schools for disadvantaged kids.

Still, if the campus and its host city - a hyper-liberal enclave where stop signs are vandalized to read "STOP (DRIVING)" - were the whole California electorate, those advocating to overturn 209 might win.

"Most of the people" in the rest of the state "think the people in Berkeley are a bunch of nut balls," said Karen DeVrieze, who lives and works in southern California.

A summary of a recent poll, commissioned by opponents of 209, found that voters believe discrimination remains a problem and that government should do something about it.

David Mermin, who helped conduct the poll, said 15 percent of Californians responded that 209 had affected their lives negatively; 18 percent said the effect was positive, and 58 percent saw no difference.

But Paterson, a University of California-Berkeley-educated attorney, and other repeal advocates said public amnesia about 209 presents opponents with an opportunity to start fresh and avoid mistakes they made in 1996.

Hicks is a lifelong Californian who became a communist after he was radicalized by the Watts race riot of 1965. In 1996, Hicks was among Paterson's top allies.

"You simply can't make the case that racism has gotten worse in California in the last 10 years," Hicks said. "There has been no decline in the status of black people in California."

Consider Elizabeth Samano, 37, a single mother of three who lives in Isleton, a town in the farm country along the Sacramento River with a population of 840.

Still, she said discrimination is a part of daily life. Even in Isleton, where Mexican immigrants may be a majority, unskilled workers who can't speak English are viewed as lowlifes, she said.

California in 2006, in fact, is much different even from the way it was when its voters approved Proposition 209, 54 percent to 46 percent, in 1996. Then, California still had a white majority (51 percent).

Today, populations of white people (43 percent) and African Americans (6 percent) in California are waning in relative size as the number of Latinos (36 percent) and Asians (12 percent) grows, according to census data. In five years, Latinos are projected to overtake whites as the state's largest racial or ethnic group.

Some of the dominant political and cultural events leading up to the 1996 election were racially charged - the police beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991, riots in 1992 and the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995.

In Michigan, race relations are still generally defined by black and white. Detroit and a few other urban centers are predominantly black; the rest of the state is mostly white. Michigan is 80 percent white and 14 percent black, according to the U.S. Census estimates for 2005.

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