Let’s get one thing clear: property taxes are a race issue.

The city and state require landowners to pay property taxes, which directly fund social services like schools and mental health services. Property tax rules are controlled by the state and have historically been a contested issue. Property taxes are on the ballot again in this year’s election as the Schools and Communities First Initiative, and it comes at an important time in California’s history. 

In 1978, business interests completely overhauled the property tax code in order to protect their long-term finances. Proposition 13 created property tax loopholes, which dramatically reduced the amount of funding for schools and other essential services. 

Since then, corporations have not contributed fairly to public society, and communities of color have suffered as a result. According to a Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) survey conducted in 2018, 57% of Californians say that Proposition 13 was ‘mostly’ a good thing but only 39% of  African Americans held that view. Passing Proposition 15 will not only start to fix the effects of Proposition 13, but California can begin to restore the damage that resulted from decades of disinvestment in our communities.

Over the past 40 years, Proposition 13 has caused whole communities and schools to see a drastic drop in funding, and people of color have felt the consequences. 

People like me, people like my family, people who depend on the public education system — we have felt the consequences.

As a Mexican-American son of a single, immigrant mother, I have learned firsthand about inequality in our society. I have experienced oppression in my education when I was limited to applying to under-resourced schools. Once admitted, I was not even aware that I was being disadvantaged by an education system that had been bankrupted by wealthy corporations. 

Throughout my education, I changed schools, starting from Toluca Lake to Celerity Palmati, and eventually graduating from Granada Hills Charter High School. I was able to experience how wealth differs from school to school and how that has a direct effect on the quality of education received by students. 

A family with higher economic flexibility and more wealth has the freedom to take their children to “better” schools, or has the freedom to live in “better” neighborhoods. And the ones who get the short end of the stick are families without that flexibility. Statistics show that those families are Black and brown families. My family. 

I developed resentment toward the world. I was angry. As a community we all have a responsibility to uplift and protect one another by combating societal problems that have been caused by selfish people pursuing wealth, power, and ego. 

I began to question: were the odds set against my family and me?

I now know they were. 

This shouldn’t be normalized. This shouldn’t just be regarded as the “the way things are.” We have to stand up against corporate greed, against corruption, against prejudice and social injustices. We have an opportunity now to make education better in all schools, and it starts when we vote Yes on Prop 15.

Proposition 24 won’t strengthen privacy rights for Californians. Instead, it will undermine protections in current law and increase the burden on people to protect themselves—in ways that will disproportionately harm poor people and people of color. Please vote NO on Prop 24.

We oppose Prop 24 because it will not protect the privacy of the most vulnerable Californians. Black and immigrant communities need strong privacy rights to protect themselves from corporate discrimination as well as state violence. But Prop 24 threatens to make privacy a luxury available only for the most privileged Californians. By forcing Californians to pay for their privacy and opt-out, it places the burden of privacy on the individual, a load those in working families and marginalized communities cannot bear.

Prop 24 is also full of loopholes that undermine consumer privacy, including a carveout written by the credit-reporting industry, weakened privacy protections for Californians when they travel, and new ways to keep consumers in the dark about what companies are doing with their personal information. For every step forward, there are two steps back. That approach won’t advance privacy in California.

Prop 24 = Pay for Privacy

Californians shouldn’t have to pay for privacy, particularly when the California Constitution guarantees privacy as an inalienable right. This is even more essential due to the COVID-19 pandemic; online privacy is more important than ever with Californians spending more time learning, working, and shopping online. Prop 24 doesn’t just fail to fix this; it makes it worse with a new exception that allows companies to charge you more if you tell them not to sell your personal information. 

The fact is that working families are already struggling to stay healthy, find a job, keep food on the table, and maintain their housing. No one should be put in the position of choosing between the necessities of survival and their privacy. Privacy is a right, not a luxury for people who can afford it.

Prop 24 = Privacy Paperwork

Californians overwhelmingly want companies to ask permission before sharing their personal information. Privacy as a default puts individuals squarely in control of their own information by making it impossible for any company to sell or otherwise disclose their information without explicitly obtaining consent. 

Under current law, companies have to respect people’s privacy choices when they use a “global opt-out” to indicate that their personal information should not be sold. But Prop 24 makes respecting this choice optional for companies, letting them force consumers to manually opt-out separately on each website and app they use—and with the hundreds of data brokers that might buy and sell their personal information. Requiring people to fill out forms to get privacy protection is an unacceptable burden for everyone, but especially for communities who are already struggling.

Prop 24 = Privacy Loopholes 

Prop 24 introduces numerous other exceptions and loopholes that will further weaken privacy protections for Californians. For example:

• The credit reporting industry wrote their own exception to California privacy law, and that exception appears, word for word, in Prop 24.
• Prop 24 weakens protection for biometric information to protect companies while leaving users exposed.
• Under Prop 24, companies could be permitted to pull private information off people’s devices the moment they leave the state.
• Under Prop 24, police can stop companies from allowing people to protect themselves by deleting their own personal information. The police can issue a blanket order even if no crime has been committed, including, for example, locking down the information of people in the vicinity of a protest against police violence.
• Prop 24 adds a new exception so companies can scrape information from social media sites and other sources without giving people any privacy protection. Social media images have been used to sell people’s identities to the police or to ICE, who will use it to track or terrorize immigrants.
• There is a new exception in Prop 24 allowing companies to refuse requests for information the company has collected or generated about consumers based on vague claims that something in that information might be proprietary or somehow valuable to the business. 
• And Prop 24 creates a new back door for service providers like Facebook to add exceptions and ways to exploit people’s information in the future.

Prop 24 = Less Privacy for Those Who Need It Most

Californians need a privacy law that protects everyone equally, Black or white, rich or poor. The truth is, working people can't afford to pay the money or spend the time Prop 24 would demand. Even those who are highly motivated to protect their privacy may be unable to do so under Prop 24. For immigrant families, or activists fighting police brutality, this change—and the practical inability to keep personal information about who you are, where you go, and what you do private—could be a matter of life and death.

Privacy as a privilege is the wrong response to our current reckoning with systemic bias and injustice that has long placed extra burdens on Black, immigrant, and other vulnerable Californians.

Prop 24 fails to deliver privacy protections for all. Californians should vote no on Prop 24.

View more information and other proposition recommendations. Paid for by American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.