Rep. Denise Ennett, D-Little Rock, criticizes Senate Bill 3, which would “prohibit discrimination or preferential treatment” by public entities during a House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs meeting on Wednesday, February 5, 2025. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)
A bill that a slew of critics say would impede minorities’ opportunities for success in Arkansas passed a legislative panel on a split voice vote Wednesday after nearly three hours of debate.
Senate Bill 3 would “prohibit discrimination or preferential treatment” by public entities and eliminate required minority recruitment and retention plans and reports from public school districts and higher education institutions.
The bill would also repeal language in state procurement proposals that encourage minority participation or require bidders to adopt an equal opportunity hiring program designed to increase the percentage of minority employees.
Rep. Mary Bentley, R-Perryville, presented the bill as its co-lead sponsor to the House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, the bill’s primary sponsor, was absent due to illness.
Bentley echoed many statements Sullivan made last week to the full Senate and its equivalent committee. The Senate passed the bill Jan. 29 by a vote of 24-7, with two not voting and two marked as present.
Bentley said the bill would eliminate affirmative action in Arkansas and prioritize “individual merit, aptitude, hard work and determination” over “illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they are capable of doing.”
“While we do have pockets of racism remaining in our nation, the notion that America is a racist country is simply false,” Bentley said.
She added that President Donald Trump, shortly after his inauguration in January, signed an executive order declaring an end to all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities” in the federal government. He also revoked a decades-old executive order from then-President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 on affirmative action in federal contracting.
Bentley said Arkansas policy should align with that of the federal government, including a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared unconstitutional the use of affirmative action in higher education.
At Wednesday’s hearing, political scientist Dr. Gail Choate repeated a point she made to the Senate State Agencies committee last week. She said that despite federal orders, states have the power to ensure that federal policies meet their citizens’ needs.
Choate was one of 13 Arkansans who spoke against SB 3 on Wednesday. Many of them said they opposed rolling back policies and programs that uplift historically underrepresented groups.
“If you say yes to this bill, you’re not just taking away policies, you’re taking away opportunities from those who have fought to reach the same rung on the ladder that others have started on, [and] that will be your legacy,” said Daisy Onoriobe, a Philander Smith University student representing the Black caucus and the women’s caucus within the Young Democrats of Arkansas.
While the bill does not explicitly mention DEI or the phrase it abbreviates, the bill would strike the three individual words from state law several times over.
For example, the Equity Assistance Center in the state’s Division of Elementary and Secondary Education would be renamed the Equality Assistance Center. Its purpose would be to assist the state’s public school districts with “desegregation and nondiscrimination” instead of “affirmative action, program accessibility, human relations, awareness, and desegregation” as currently required.
Civil rights and legal issues
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by Johnson, protects people from employment discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Senate Bill 3 has similar language but replaces “religion” with “ethnicity.”
The bill would also strike the term “civil rights” from state law three times and replace the phrase with “desegregation and nondiscrimination.”
Democratic Reps. Denise Ennett of Little Rock and Nicole Clowney of Fayetteville both said they had yet to hear concrete examples of harm resulting from the state’s existing programs focused on minorities.
Clowney said considering national origin is sometimes necessary to find the most qualified person for a job in education, such as Marshallese liaisons in Northwest Arkansas school districts. She also expressed concerns that schools’ extracurricular activities aimed at girls would lose access to resources.
Additionally, Rep. Julie Mayberry, R-Hensley, said she would not vote for the bill because she feared it would negatively impact students with disabilities who use individualized education programs or 504 plans to overcome barriers to their education.
Bentley said she believed SB 3 would not affect the things Clowney and Mayberry mentioned. She said in response to a question from Rep. Wayne Long, R-Bradford, that Arkansas could face lawsuits for not aligning its policies with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action.
The text of the bill would allow anyone “who believes his or her rights have been impacted under this section” to file a civil lawsuit and allow a judge who sides with the plaintiff to issue an injunction and allow the plaintiff to recover court costs and attorneys’ fees. This increases the likelihood of legal complaints against the state instead of decreasing it, said attorney Maricella Garcia, the Race Equity director at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.
In response to questions from Mayberry, Garcia said schools might be disinclined under the proposed law to give students with disabilities more time to finish exams than their peers have.
“Schools are more likely to be cautious in how they approach any kind of extra access because that will potentially give someone else the opportunity to say, ‘I didn’t get extra minutes and that was unfair,’” Garcia said.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
More concerns
An earlier version of SB 3 would have made violating it a Class A misdemeanor. Bentley amended the bill to remove this provision, meaning the Senate will have to consider the bill again if it passes the House.
Sen. Alan Clark of Lonsdale was the only Republican senator to vote against SB 3 last week. He said he could not support amending a scholarship designed to attract qualified minority teachers to the Delta, a rural area with a significant Black population and a known teacher shortage.
Ennett said she agreed with Clark’s concern that the bill would make it more difficult to hire Black male teachers, who could help Black male students improve their educational outcomes.
She asked Bentley if she agreed that Black and white Americans have different lived experiences; Bentley said yes.
Ennett said white individuals such as Bentley are not able to understand the lived experiences of Black people. Bentley said she took offense at this.
Deborah Springer-Suttler said she found it personally offensive that Bentley repeated Trump’s statement from last week, without evidence, that a deadly aircraft collision in Washington D.C. was the fault of unqualified aviation personnel hired via DEI efforts.
Springer-Suttler also called SB 3 “segregation 2025” and said discrimination against white people is “mathematically impossible.”
“We are not taking anything from anybody because we get a job,” she said. “We are qualified for positions just like white people are qualified. We never asked for preferential treatment. We asked to be treated equally.”
Other opponents of the bill represented the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas, Little Rock’s Second Baptist Church, and the Little Rock chapter of the Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta.
Janie Ginocchio and John Kelly, representing the alcoholic beverage retail industry, both said they opposed the section of SB 3 that would prohibit the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division from considering a “lack of diversity in ownership and financial interest in the geographic area at issue” in the liquor sale permit application process. They and committee members said existing law intends to prevent monopolies within families rather than increase racial or gender diversity in liquor sales.
Robert Steinbuch, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock law professor, was the only person to speak for the bill, as he was before the Senate committee on Jan. 28.
SB 3 is similar to another bill, also sponsored by Sullivan, that failed on the House floor in 2023 after several passionate speeches from members of both parties. The current bill differs from its predecessor with the addition of language explicitly stating that the legislation is not meant to affect preferences provided to veterans under law based on their status as veterans.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.