The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action.

• Author: Mastio, David M.

The affirmative action debate is burdened by more than its share of writers who care not a whit about changing minds, only scoring points. Richard Kahlenberg is not one of them. The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action is an honest and kind critique of racial entitlements--honest because it leaves no doubt about the consequences of the current regime, and kind because it offers an effective alternative.

Kahlenberg judges race-based programs a failure at two of the goals most dear to Americans--getting closer to a color-blind society over time and helping the races live better together. There are other arguments for racial preferences, but these ideals, inspired by the civil rights movement, account for the bulk of their support. Affirmative action's sickly performance in meeting these goals should make even the most adamant partisan reconsider.

The failure to achieve a color-blind society is obvious--even proponents of race-based affirmative action have all but abandoned it as a goal. As for increasing social harmony, even the mention of affirmative action raises whites' ire. "When affirmative action is not mentioned in a poll question," Kahlenberg writes, "26 percent of whites believe African Americans tend to be irresponsible, but when affirmative action is mentioned in passing, the number climbs to 43 percent." Blacks aren't perfectly comfortable with affirmative action, either. Kahlenberg cites a 1992 UCLA study that finds middle-class blacks--the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action--find it less appealing than poor whites do.

The point of Kahlenberg's book, however, is not to tear down affirmative action but to reinvigorate it, based on the inclusive idea of class, not the divisive grounds of race. Clearly, division is what current affirmative action programs are based on. Their two principal architects, Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon, believed exactly that.

King convinced much of white America that in order to overcome lifetimes of oppression, blacks needed explicit protection of their civil rights; the movement he started culminated in the affirmative action programs we know today. But when he turned his attention away from antidiscrimination laws and toward a broader struggle for economic development, King saw the problems with giving blacks a leg up in education and the marketplace. "Many white workers," he wrote, "whose economic condition is not too far removed from the economic condition of his black brother...