Ending Affirmative Action: The Case for Colorblind Justice.

• Author: Barrett, Paul

These slender volumes deliver what they advertise: lively polemics for and against affirmative action. You have heard the basic arguments before, most likely, but the authors go a step or two further than the conventional newspaper op-ed pieces. Terry Eastland, a conservative journalist and think-tanker, provides a little more history, some of it enlightening, some cockeyed. Liberal economist Barbara R. Bergmann offers a few more numbers and studies that fall in much the same categories.

Neither author seems interested in presenting a balanced picture, so standing alone, neither book will persuade the skeptic who suspects there is both good and bad in affirmative action. As a two-person act, however, Eastland and Bergmann could probably get a pretty provocative debate going. In fact, Basic Books, publisher of both works, might have saved trees and reader expense by binding the books into one text arranged in point-counterpoint chapters.

Eastland, who served in the Reagan Justice Department and wrote an earlier anti-affirmative action book with GOP ideologist William Bennett, has honed his arrows for years. Many hit their target. For example, he asks reasonably enough whether we need to give a leg up in public contracting to highly skilled immigrants--say, computer programmers recently arrived from India or Pakistan. How about when their kids apply to state schools? Eastland shows that policies originally justified as remedies for past discrimination have become twisted to benefit people whose race-related difficulties, if any, occurred far from American shores.

Even if you're a gung-ho integrationist, Eastland argues, you have to feel a little uncomfortable about the University of Texas Law School setting up an entirely separate admissions track, complete with lower academic standards, for its black and Hispanic applicants. Doesn't that go beyond using race as a "plus" factor, or one among many variables, as the Supreme Court said it would tolerate in the 1978 University of California vs. Bakke decision? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently said it did in a ruling that struck down the UT Law School admissions procedure. The conservative activists on that appeals court then went a big step further and suggested that Bakke itself should be tossed out in a drive to rid higher education of racial preferences.

Eastland contends that affirmative action inevitably produces injustice, even when it helps the African-Americans to...