Beyond racial preferences: a handful of programs are showing that there is life after affirmative action.

• Author: Worth, Robert

Last December, at his national town meeting on race relations in Akron, Ohio, President Clinton had finally agreed to listen to critics of affirmative action. "Americans believe in affirmative action," said Abigail Thernstrom, a demure middle-aged author with silver hair. "They don't believe in preferences." Clinton, never one to miss a sound bite, thrust his oversized microphone into Thernstrom's face: "Abigail, do you favor the U.S. Army abolishing the affirmative action program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or no? Yes or no?"

Clinton seemed to think he had scored a home run. But what does Powell say about how he got ahead? "I benefited from equal opportunity," the general wrote in his 1994 autobiography, "... but I was not shown preference. The Army, as a matter of fairness, made sure that performance would be the only measure of advancement."

Instead of stumping for racial preferences, Clinton should focus on the words Powell used: equal opportunity. Because like it or not, preference programs are collapsing like rotten timber in school boards and courthouses across the country. The Supreme Court recently refused to hear a challenge to California's ballot initiative banning race and gender preferences, Proposition 209. In fact, the court has been moving slowly but surely towards a ruling in favor of Title VII's original meaning: Race and gender discrimination is illegal, unless it is intended as a remedy for specific prior injustice.

Many liberals would deplore this ruling as a return to segregation. But the fact that Bill Cosby's children still have a government-sponsored advantage over those of a white welfare mother makes most voters furious. A recent study published by Harvard University Press found that the mere mention of affirmative action inspires racial animosity in whites. Thirty years after Martin Luther King's stirring call for a color-blind society, the persistence of racial quotas strikes most Americans as an insult to his legacy.

Nor has affirmative action really helped those it was meant for. "Preferential treatment," writes essayist Shelby Steele, "no matter how it is justified in the light of day, subjects blacks to a midnight of self-doubt, and so often transforms their advantage into a revolving door." At mostly white campuses, the dropout rate for blacks and Hispanics is five times the rate for whites. In the workplace, preference programs brand minorities and women as mere tokens, and they may well help to maintain the "glass ceiling" on minority promotions that they were designed to remedy. Even their most ardent defenders admit that preference programs have done little or nothing for the truly disadvantaged black poor.

Worst of all, affirmative action has sucked away political support for need-based programs that would address the most glaring realities of unequal opportunity. Almost one in four American children under six years old is living in poverty today, a vastly disproportionate number of them black and Hispanic, but the programs that might give them a fair start in life are stir underfunded. It's not just the schools that are bad; some children never even get that far. "Some of our families have talked about putting out their lights at night, and crawling through certain rooms, because they were afraid of being shot," says Dr. Mary Jo Ward, director of the Heads Up Literacy Project at New York Hospital. "They cant go for a quart of milk, because they're afraid of never coming back." Those aren't exactly ideal conditions for learning to read and write.

Americans don't believe in racial preferences, but they do believe in giving a hand to kids who live in constant fear of being shot. Now that preferences are all but gone, it's time to start focusing again on the programs that will help to create something like a level playing field for all young people by the time they're 18. In effect, that will mean helping out a lot of minority children -- not because we want the world to look like an ad for the United Colors of Benetton, but because we believe in equal opportunity. And as it happens, the institution that produced Colin Powell -- the U.S. Army -- has been leading the way.

Buffalo Soldiers

Most people know that the Army has been one of the great sources of opportunity for African-Americans, but few understand that it doesn't actually practice racial preferences. Instead, it seeks out promising young minority and low-income kids and enrolls them in aggressive, boot camp-style remedial programs -- an example civilian schools and employers would do well to heed. Consider, for instance, the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School (USMAPS) in Eatontown, N.J. Established in 1916, USMAPS' rigorous 10-month program is designed to bring promising but low-scoring candidates up to speed for West Point, which is still the Army's most prestigious source of commissions. Because blacks score on average almost...