Reaching Beyond Race.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.

Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines Harvard University Press, $22.95

Straight Talk on Race

President Clinton's ongoing national dialogue on race relations may be laudable, but it will do little good unless Americans can break free from the simplistic formulas that define the current debate. The following two reviews are an important step in that direction. Richard Kahlenberg makes an original argument that in order for affirmative action to be both effective and popular it must he refocused to correct the disparities between the classes instead of those between the races. And Kahlenberg finds intriguing evidence to support his proposal in a new book by Paul Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines. Next, Scott Shuger explains how Lou Cannon's fresh new reporting on the Rodney King beating will force readers to rethink their assumptions about the true meaning of that infamous event.

Since 1994 America's 30-year experiment with affirmative action has clearly been in jeopardy, but the struggle over its final outcome is anything but predictable. Opponents of race and gender preferences declared victory when a California initiative banning preferences was approved in 1996, only to suffer defeat on a similar referendum in Houston in 1997 In the U.S. Senate, opponents successfully blocked Bill Lann Lee's confirmation as assistant attorney general for civil rights, but in the House of Representatives, an attempt to curtail affirmative action went down to defeat in committee. Opponents of preferences appeared to be headed for a big win when the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving the use of race in layoffs, but a coalition of big business and civil rights groups prevented the case, Piscataway v. Taxman, from being heard by financing an out-of-court settlement.

The great national debate over affirmative action is turning out to be more complex than we thought. Publication of a fascinating new book, Reaching Beyond Race, should help us understand the increasingly complicated affirmative action discussion. The authors, political science professors Paul M. Sniderman of Stanford and Edward G. Carmines of Indiana University, employ a number of tricks to help us determine what Americans really think about race and affirmative action. Along the way, the book explodes various myths held by both sides of the affirmative action controversy. Of the book's four central findings, the first three are likely to disturb proponents of affirmative action, while the fourth will unsettle opponents.

Finding #1: Deep down, white liberal Democrats are as...