One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America.

Masters of the Dream: The Strength and Betrayal of Black America, by Alan L. Keyes (Morrow, 414 pp., $23)

One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America, by Glenn C. Loury (Free Press, 324 pp., $24.95)

Mr. DiIulio is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, and director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Management.

IN AMERICA, traditional family life and religious attachments plus economic hustle and civil rights equal material well-being and social progress. Black Americans are no exception to the rule. Today most blacks inhabit neither the Other America of relentless rural poverty nor the underclass America of inner-city ills. Look at almost any statistical portrait you wish and the positive results of the ongoing middle-classification of black America will look back at you.

Before the Second World War, about 5 per cent of blacks had a middle-class income. Today it's 60 per cent. Three-fourths of the 24.5 million blacks who live in metropolitan areas do not live in census tracts where 40 per cent or more of the resident population is below the poverty line.

Or take scholastic achievement. Over the last few decades, black illiteracy has nearly vanished. Black public-school students have made modest but steady progress as measured by average scores on several national standardized tests and by high-school completion rates. Between 1982 and 1992, the fraction of black high-school students enrolled in chemistry courses more than doubled, to 46 per cent; the fraction that took physics nearly tripled, to 18 per cent; and the fraction that studied calculus almost quintupled, to 7 per cent. Across the board, a somewhat higher fraction of whites than blacks took the toughest courses; but in each case the percentage of blacks who took them in 1992 was higher than the percentage of whites who did so in 1982.

Still, there remain deep problems within the black community. Glenn Loury and Alan Keyes are well-known, Harvard-educated black intellectuals. Loury, formerly a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, is a top-flight academic economist at Boston University. Keyes, a past president of Alabama A&M University, is a popular talk-show host and Republican presidential hopeful.

Their respective books on the condition of black America have much in common. Both men write about black America in a way that is analytically precise yet morally passionate, highly personal yet intellectually profound. Both men identify spirituality as the key to black success and the loss of Christ-centered family life as the road to black ruin. Neither suffers gladly liberal elites who persist in peddling the view that white racism explains all. But each reserves some of his harshest words for prominent conservatives whose views on black America betray (as Keyes puts it) "an appalling combination of bias, ignorance, and flawed reasoning," or who advance (in Loury's rendering) "the crudest racial generalization."

These are two of the best, most honest, most moving books about the American dilemma published since Martin Luther King Jr. stirred the nation with his dream. Five reflective pages of Loury's book are better than fifty typical "scientific" studies by policy scholars. The endnote commentary in Keyes's book (my favorite instance: black elites who push poor black mothers to have abortions turn "the logic of economic determinism from a justification for slavery into an argument for self-inflicted genocide") rings truer and burns hotter than a whole Jesse Jackson speech.

Loury believes American "society is fundamentally racialist," a word he prefers to "the more condemnatory and less informative term racist." It's 1995, yet white - black intermarriage rates remain low, residential segregation is still the norm, and "racial distinctions" condition "whom we befriend, whom we embrace." Of course, he's right. On the one hand, most Americans (65 per cent) now accept interracial dating as legitimate (unthinkable even a generation ago), flat-out worship Michael Jordan, and would love a chance to vote for Colin Powell. On the other hand, many whites hear "AFDC" and picture black welfare queens, hear "affirmative action" and think us-against-them.

I hereby nominate Loury as referee of our national debate over affirmative action. No one understands the economics of the issue better. And no one is more forthright in recognizing that preferential treatment often results in "the patronization of black workers or students," meaning "behavior that does not hold blacks to the same standard of expected accomplishment as whites, because of the belief that blacks are not as capable."

But Loury stresses that neither the perverse consequences of preferential treatment, nor the facts about crime, nor the data on the white - black IQ gap furnish any intellectual or moral excuse for ignoring the degree to which poverty and other ills remain concentrated among disadvantaged blacks. In particular, if you're a conservative who eschews "a more complete social integration than has yet been achieved," or would be content simply to forget, blame, or cast off "those who now languish at the bottom of American society," then you need to hear the gospel according to Glenn.

Compared to Loury, Keyes is more the preacher than the professor, and what he preaches to blacks is the good news: "Our common identity owes much to our shared experience of oppression, but it owes much more to the moral and spiritual resources that made it possible to survive in spite of it." But the black community, he argues, has had its spiritual resources squandered by liberal elites, including elite blacks who continue to support "the federalization of the black agenda" and to "shill for ineffective, but politically salient, national programs" in return for "rich rewards from white power holders."

Keyes emphasizes that it's spirituality, not material incentives, that has mattered most in the history of black America. Despite apartheid-like segregation laws and crushing poverty, black families of the pre - civil-rights era prayed together and stayed together. None of the pathologies of present-day inner-city life afflicted them because they "lived up to the standards suggested by their faith."

"The black church," observes Keyes, "is the spiritual storehouse of the black multitudes." Social scientists, he asserts, have ignored or denied "the church's moral influence or integrity," not only because of their secular ideology but because of their quantitative methodology. Loury, too, expresses deep doubts about whether "the academic endeavor generously termed social science" is at all capable of addressing "in a satisfactory manner the most fundamental social problems."

Amen. But don't forget the small but growing body of religion- friendly, community-oriented social science. For example, a recent study found that, even after controlling for all relevant individual characteristics, youths whose neighbors attend church are more likely to find a job, less likely to use drugs, and less apt to commit crime.

In addition to his spiritual call to arms, Keyes wants each black community to "elect a neighborhood council, or governing body, which would be empowered to pass ordinances concerning the peace, order, and welfare of the neighborhood." For example, "society could require that any parole be contingent on the willingness of the offender's neighborhood council to accept custody of the parolee," and the council could revoke parole if in its view the "offender has again become a threat to decency and order in the neighborhood." I would vote for the plan tomorrow. But even as a visionary statement, it is a bit too sketchy. And even as a man of faith, Keyes must sense that political and other barriers make it close to impossible.

At points, both Keyes and Loury are carried away from harsh realities by their own lofty hopes, righteous rhetoric, personal revelations, and spiritual enthusiasm. Neither, for example, squarely confronts the fact that black males aged 14 to 17 constitute less than 0.5 per cent of the population but commit 8 per cent of all murders. Neither reckons adequately with the social implications of the 25 to 30 per cent increase in this population that will occur between now and the year 2005. And neither is totally frank in admitting that about all that's left of the "black community" in some pockets of urban America is deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults surrounded by severely abused and neglected children, virtually all of whom were born out of wedlock.

A troubling thought occurred to me as I put down these two wonderful books. It's that their spiritual message could be reflexively rejected -- and rightly rejected -- not only by the morally corrupt elite liberal establishment, black and white, but by inner-city black Americans and especially by inner-city black teenagers.

"Human beings," writes Loury, "are spiritual creatures; we have souls; we have free will." But does the exercise of "free will" explain why thousands of young black males are rotting in New Jersey's prisons while thousands of affluent young whites are studying at Princeton University? I do not know precisely how or whether bad homes, bad genes, or bad incentives figure in predatory criminal behavior. But am I really to ask the members of the nearly all-black lifers' group at East Jersey State Prison to believe that, when all is said and done, they are where they are because they have bad souls? Am I to encourage my Princeton students to believe that, in the end, we live in a world of race-based inequalities in which, nonetheless, people get what they deserve?

Likewise, can anyone expect black urban gangsters such as the Bloods and the Crips to heed the Bible-thumping message of brother Keyes? These super-violent teens are the real-life descendants of the fictional Bigger Thomas immortalized in Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son. In one of the novel's most gripping passages, Bigger, who awaits the executioner for murdering two girls, one white, the other black, is visited in jail by his mother's preacher. "Fergit ever'thing but yo' soul, son," the preacher counsels Bigger. "Gawd looks past yo' skin 'n' inter yo' soul. He's lookin' at the only parta yuh tha's His. He wants yuh 'n' he loves yuh. Give yo'se'f t'Im, son." The preacher offers Bigger a cross, which the manchild accepts to please his mother and pacify the preacher. But later, an enraged Bigger snatches the cross from his own throat.

"I can die without a cross!" Bigger tells his shocked white guards, "I ain't got no soul!"

Post-civil-rights-era black America is truly this country's greatest success story. But whether there is anything that can be done to save the treasure and prevent the terror of America's black inner-city children, to reduce inner-city rates of illegitimate birth, crime, substance abuse, and poverty, God only knows.