The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call.

Carl Rowan has given The Coming Race War in America the subtitle: "A Wake-Up Call." Well, hell, as he might say in this colloquially written book, there's plenty for the nation to be awakened to. And what does it matter that I believe the apocalyptic prediction of his book is somewhat overwrought? If it alerts an either blind or uncaring America to its disastrous race relations--or. worse, if it fails to do so--a little overstatement will hardly matter.

Anyway, Rowan is on target most of the time. Even in an impassioned introduction, where he writes that a race war can be averted "only if we stop denying that a grave threat exists," his point is powerfully taken. Even if you don't believe there's a realistic threat of armed racial conflict, you'd better believe there is a high probability of economic and social decline that will blight the nation's future far more surely than the federal deficit over which so many crocodile tears are shed.

Americans cannot afford to deny that threat. Rowan puts it graphically: "While some blacks found dignity and political clout and economic opportunity over the last thirty years, the great mass of black Americans have not."

In other words, for all the illusory successes of the civil rights movement, and despite the deluded or willful belief of so many whites, including Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, that the movement resulted in a color-blind society, the nation remains a house divided--or, as other writers have put it, two nations, separate and unequal.

For confirmation, choose any statistic--that black unemployment consistently runs at twice the level of white joblessness, that the median net worth of black households is $4,604 compared to $44,408 for white households; or that, as Rowan writes, "the normal black family has $57 for every $100 available to the normal white family" That's a drop from the ratio of $64 to $100 in the Great Society era.

White racism, whether expressed as discrimination or indifference, in Rowan's view, is the primary cause of such disgraceful differences, and has made possible the unthinkable--a race war. There's a limit, he argues, "to how much oppression black Americans will take," regardless of how much firepower would be arrayed against the armed rebellion. He cites the Mayan Indian Zapatistas of the Chiapas state in Mexico for precedent--a weak people but one who "wouldn't take it any more" Even if their revolt can't win, they have made it clear "that life in Mexico [can] never be the same"

Rowan believes that the discriminatory attitudes of many whites, together with the more lethal plans of supremacist groups hoping "to take back America," will bring on a race war in which "black involvement...will largely be reactive" He also predicts that the lack of adequate gun control laws will result in extreme violence; and that Latinos, after realizing "the paranoiacs who spew forth rhetoric about killing to save the white race have no more respect for brown people than they do for black people," ultimately will fight beside blacks.

The last seems to me one of a handful of questionable contentions in what is admittedly a polemic--a "wake-up call" that is more nearly a cry of anger and anguish than a summons to arms. "If you run your society," Rowan asserts irrefutably, "in a way that leaves millions of men and women poorly educated and untrained for work, and millions more denied decent jobs because of racial and sexual discrimination, then you are going to have millions of people living in poverty"

Rowan insists, moreover, that in such a society there will be--and is, in the United States--"a direct correlation between a community's rate of violent crimes and its levels of racism--reflected in poverty, dearth of jobs and good schools, level of family breakdown, drug trafficking, sexual exposure and abuse, and general hopelessness and despair"

Too few whites, however, see, or will admit, that chain of cause and effect. They point instead to blacks' supposed genetic inferiority, laziness deficient values, sexual promiscuity, criminal tendencies, or all of the above.

One by one, Rowan takes on these myths. He ably defends affirmative action ("Ninety-six percent of all the scholarship money in America goes to whites"), refutes those who believe welfare recipients are merely lazy, derides the argument that ending welfare will stop out-of-wedlock pregnancies, demolishes claims that blacks are genetically inferior, and persuasively attributes much of black crime (while admitting there's a lot of it) to poverty, homelessness, and a lack of jobs.

That lack, not welfare, he points out, is "how and why black people have become the heart of America's permanent underclass" Amen to that.

If you, like me, despite this cri de coeur, are not convinced of the likelihood of a race war, here's another Rowan prediction that may make you think twice: "If present trends continue, an absolute majority of black males aged 18 to 40 will be in prison and camps by the year 2010"--14 years from now.

If you or I were facing that prospect, we'd fight too.

TOM WICKER is a former columnist for The New York Times and the author of Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America.