The Right Affirmative Action.

• Author: KAHLENBERG, RICHARD D.
• Position: Review

A new book argues that race has gotten short shrift. The author is wrong--and so are our policies

Turning Back: The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy Stephen Steinberg, Beacon Press, $25

At first glance, the title of Stephen Steinberg's book, Turning Back: The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy, might suggest a story about Pete Wilson and Bob Dole, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, or Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. But Steinberg's real targets are those liberals (and former liberals) he believes have abandoned their commitment to racial justice: Bill Clinton and William Julius Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, Cornel West and Mario Cuomo.

Steinberg, a Queens College sociologist, is principally concerned with an old, but highly significant, fight among liberals: Should efforts to help the disadvantaged focus on race or on class? When concerns about race and class conflict with each other, as they sometimes do, which interest should prevail? When it comes to today's hot issue, affirmative action, should the left support the kind of policy that also helps poor whites (as class-based approaches do) or rich blacks (as race-based approaches do)?

Steinberg, a firm believer in dispensing aid by racial criteria, argues that his side is losing the debate. Following the civil rights movement, liberals have been abandoning the idea of helping minorities per se which, he says, is very bad. His book, an intellectual history of one of the country's most important issues, is interesting and well-written. But it is also deeply flawed. If anything, the current debate over affirmative action shows that, despite some undercurrents of doubt, most liberals are still, like Steinberg, dedicated to the notion of policies based on race--and that is the real bad news.

Turning Back begins in the 1940s, well before the civil rights era. At the time, argues Steinberg, traditional figures on the left--like Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and Columbia historian Henry Steele Commager--were so consumed by class inequality that they did not recognize the need to address racial prejudice. Steinberg notes, for example, that in the 1300 pages of Myrdal's An American Dilemma, which details virtually every facet of American race relations, there is "no mention of the need for civil rights legislation." At the time, he adds, both The Nation and The New Republic, the leading liberal journals, tended to "subsume race to class" even going "so far as to portray lynching during the Depression as...