In Defense of Affirmative Action.

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 whom the country still arguably owes some form of recompense and special protection. The real victims these days, Eastland maintains, are the white guys who get pushed down the police department promotion ladder, lose the municipal paving contract, or receive the law school rejection letter--all because of favoritism to minorities or women. If minority students disappear from UT Law School, as many will without getting a break on grades and test scores, they can go to less prestigious schools in the state, Eastland reasons. There, he predicts, they'll thrive, free of the taint of having gotten ahead because of their skin color. Perhaps. But it would be awfully eerie if institutions like the University of Texas Law School were resegregated. Eastland doesn't seem troubled enough by that prospect to grapple with the possibility that affirmative action could be fine-tuned and used in moderation.

His certainty that all affirmative action must end stems from his view of American history. He discerns in the political theory of the Founding Fathers a "colorblind" ideal that has been passed down through the generations, only to be violated in the past three decades by liberal race policies. Oh, yes, and of course there was that nastiness with slavery. And, oops, don't forget the Southern backlash after Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow regime that persisted into the 1960s.

By assuming, however implausibly, that colorblindness has been the American creed, and by identifying himself as a loyal adherent, Eastland finds it easy to be intolerant of those who would compromise this ideal. The silliness of this conceit is all the more disappointing because Eastland is quite capable of recounting historical developments in a clear and interesting way. His section in this book on the evolution of affirmative action is evidence of that. In particular, his explanation of the critical role played by Richard Nixon and his aides will no doubt be a revelation to many readers.

Bergmann, although she calls her book a defense, is stronger when she's on the attack. She dispels the increasingly common assumption that workplace discrimination has been beaten. Her evidence generally comes in small, digestible bites, like the results from "testing" projects in which researchers send out pairs of college students posing as competing job applicants for a single slot. The testers are identical except for race. Guess who tends to get the job? (Hint: not the black guy.)

But some of the survey material Bergmann presents has the mushy feel of partisan political polling: If you ask the questions the right way, you'll often get what you're looking for.

White male self-pity irritates Bergmann, and she raises legitimate questions about whether we've lost our sense of perspective. She points to a Supreme Court case in which Justice Antonin Scalia fulminated in dissent over a county affirmative action plan that resulted in a woman getting put ahead for a skilled road-maintenance job. "Designed to establish a color-blind and genderblind workplace," the federal civil rights law has "been converted into a powerful engine of racism and sexism," Scalia wrote. Given that no woman had previously ever held one of the 238 road-maintenance spots, promoting a woman who scored a couple of points lower than a male competitor on a qualifying test of dubious precision hardly seems outrageous.

Except to that man, of course. For him, Bergmann's answer is: Too bad; life is unfair. "We frequently do harm to innocent individuals for the purpose of achieving some goal," she writes. Companies, even humane ones, lay off workers to improve the bottom line and promote the interests of shareholders. Many liberals bemoan downsizing; too few are as candid as Bergmann when she describes the costs of affirmative action. In the same spirit, she acknowledges that, contrary to what most civil rights leaders will have you believe, hiring "goals" are indeed akin to quotas.

Bergmann comes up short, however, in discussing how affirmative action can be made to work well. She notes that big business has adjusted to hiring and promotion goals and shows no sign of dropping them, even in the face of conservative assaults. But she doesn't bother to discuss the emotionally draining resentment and frustration these policies have generated. Likewise, she defends affirmative action in college admissions and portrays the campus as a paragon of integration. A professor at American University, she must not be looking too closely. One of the most striking things about college campuses these days is the dramatic separation of white and black students when they're not in class.

The idea of forcing these two authors to produce a joint work really would have made sense. If they had to answer each other's arguments, rather than preach to the converted, they would have written something far more satisfying.