THE BRIDGE OVER THE RACIAL DIVIDE: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RACIAL DIVIDE: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics By William Julius Wilson University of California Press, $19.95

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON HAS been one of America's best known scholars of race and poverty for over 20 years, but this short book has an expressly political rather than scholarly purpose: to advocate the creation of a national "multiracial political coalition with a mass-based economic agenda" that would combat the dramatic increase in economic inequality that has occurred in America during the 1980s and '90s. Wilson gives almost equal weight to a second avowedly political argument, namely how such a coalition could explicitly champion "race-based affirmative action programs" without such goals "becoming racially divisive." Wilson's first aim will surprise no one who is familiar with either of his two preceding books (The Truly Disadvantaged, 1987, and When Work Disappears, 1996), but his second contention illuminates with increased frankness just how significantly Wilson's attitude toward race-conscious policies has evolved over the past 12 years.

Wilson's Bridge is not this year's only small book with a large economic agenda--Richard B. Freeman's even tinier The New Inequality: Creating Solutions for Poor America (Beacon Press) briefly advances some plausible policy ideas--but Wilson's public notoriety as President Clinton's favorite sociologist insures that his proposals will draw more attention than if the same recommendations were propounded by a less renowned academic. The most substantive and original recent books on current American poverty--Paul A. Jargowsky's Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (Russell Sage Foundation) and Dalton Conley's Being Black, Living in the Red (University of California Press)rarely if ever draw review attention from major newspapers and magazines, but the lack of originality in Wilson's analyses is not necessarily a strike against them.

What Wilson, like Freeman, terms "the rising inequality in American society" should come as no surprise to anyone who has examined income distribution statistics from the past two decades. While the top 20 percent of Americans, and especially the top 5 percent, have done very well indeed during the economic good times of the '80s and '90s, the vast majority of Americans have seen no real increase in their incomes despite the aura of prosperity. Much of the blame lies with depressed wages, especially those earned by the working poor. Anyone receiving the current federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour is unable to support a family, and if the minimum wage of thirty years ago were translated into today's dollars, it would be more than $2 higher--approximately $7.35--than it actually is. Nevertheless, a 1998 congressional effort to raise it to $6.15 went nowhere, and the successes that local activist groups have had in persuading several dozen major cities to adopt "Living Wage" measures that require municipal contractors to pay higher minimum wages have received little attention in the national press.

Wilson acknowledges that recent income statistics show that our "rising inequality has slowed in the last two years ... and may enter a period of remission," but that nascent trend will do little to reverse a situation which Wilson insists we must address. Wilson voices no new economic policy suggestions here (a reader seeking those should turn to Freeman), and Wilson's predominant focus is the politics of race, not income inequality. "A detailed discussion of the structure of a national multiracial political coalition is beyond the scope and purpose of this short book," Wilson forewarns, and instead of detailing what such a coalition might entail, Wilson devotes much of the book to a less than fully persuasive defense of race-based programs. Wilson wants to insist that "in the last decade, the nation seems to have become more divided on issues pertaining to race," and he similarly contends that if African-American citizens are going to support any economically progressive coalition, the coalition will have no choice but to embrace their special self-interest in racially-conscious selection policies. These assertions are of course nowhere near as obvious as Wilson would like a reader to believe, but the most notable aspect of Wilson's advocacy of affirmative action is how much his tone and emphasis, if not his underlying substantive views, have changed in the 12 years since he wrote The Truly Disadvantaged.

Wilson's political orientation now appears both a good deal more racialist and explicitly more elitist. In 1987, Wilson willingly conceded that affirmative action programs predominantly benefit better-off minority group members rather than the really needy: "if policies of preferential treatment ... are conceived not in terms of the actual disadvantages suffered by individuals but rather in terms of race or ethnic group membership, then these policies will further enhance the opportunities of the more advantaged without addressing the problems of the truly disadvantaged." By 1997, however, Wilson's perspective had significantly changed, for he warned in a collection entitled The New Majority that "affirmative action based solely on need or economic class position could create a situation in which African-Americans who are admitted to Harvard represent the bottom half of the socioeconomic continuum in the black community" To Wilson such an outcome would be so unfair and/or undesirable that no further comment was required.

In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson readily acknowledged that "contemporary racial problems in America, or issues perceived to be racial problems, are often part of a more general or complex set of problems whose origin and/or development may have little or no direct or indirect connection with race" Indeed, Wilson in 1987 explicitly called for "a comprehensive program that combines employment policies with social welfare policies and that features universal as opposed to race- or group-specific strategies" The second part of that stance has since been jettisoned, however, with Wilson now insisting (in the September/October issue of The American Prospect) that "an entirely race-neutral agenda would be a mistake" He warns in Bridge that "an affirmative action program based solely on financial need or economic class would do little to sustain racial and ethnic diversity," and there seems little doubt that William Julius Wilson in 1999 is more deeply committed to the advancement of that sort of diversity than to combatting economic inequality regardless of race. Indeed, some of Wilson's arguments now sound more like those of a political consultant than a scholar, as when he recommends renaming "affirmative action" "affirmative opportunity" "By changing the language we use when discussing such programs, we increase their potential for public support and make them acceptable," Wilson revealingly observes.

"Something more than formal, legal equality is required to overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation," Wilson now insists, citing "the enduring burdens--the social and psychological damage" that African-Americans bear regardless of their economic class. Irrespective of how a reader reacts to that claim, the William Julius Wilson of 1999 bears far less resemblance to the Wilson of 1987 than most readers--in the White House or elsewhere--are apt to realize.

DAVID J. GARROW, Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University Law School, reviewed both The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears for The Washington Post.