The Right Affirmative Action.

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 having more to do with class than with race." Steinberg's critique of liberals in the 1940s is right on target: Too many of them overlooked racism. Lynchings and segregation were not targeted at some amorphous "underclass" but at the American black.

In the fifties and sixties, liberals (and America) finally faced the fact of racial discrimination, passing civil rights laws and adopting race-specific policies to address the legacy of past discrimination. But it is here--with his unlikely heroic duo, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Richard Nixon--that Steinberg's argument begins to strain.

Steinberg puts great stock in King. Turning Back begins with a dedication to "Martin Luther King's celebrated dream." Steinberg quotes a passage from King's Why We Can't Wait in which King seems to endorse preferences based on race: "America must seek its own way of atoning for the injustices she has inflicted upon her Negro citizens." Steinberg also cites King's apparent denunciation of those who oppose racial preferences. "Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more."

But this is misleading. In the very same chapter in which King demanded an atonement for past injustices, he also proposed a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, to benefit poor blacks and whites alike. King knew that any program to help the disadvantaged would certainly address the nation's racist past by disproportionately benefitting blacks. But he affirmatively wanted to reach out and help poor whites as well. "It is a matter of simple justice," he wrote, "that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor." That is the real King.

There is "great irony," Steinberg continues, that racial preferences were begun not by Democrat Lyndon Johnson, but by Republican Richard Nixon. It was Nixon, he reminds us, who imposed hiring quotas on the construction unions in Philadelphia and, later, required most federal contractors to adopt race-based hiring goals and timetables.

Wedge Theory

But Steinberg's reading of Nixon is also flawed. He is correct in saying that Nixon (not Johnson) launched the effort to impose racial preferences, but he fails to probe and explain what he only concedes as an "irony." Why would Nixon, not generally known as a champion of civil rights, embrace a strategy of racial quotas which even Johnson had rejected?

Steinberg mentions, but quickly dismisses, historian Hugh Davis Graham's theory that Nixon used the Philadelphia Plan "as an opportunity to drive a wedge into the coalition between blacks and Democratic trade unions." But it is clear, from Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and others, that the divisive nature of affirmative action intrigued Nixon, and that he delighted in watching white labor and civil rights groups spar over the affirmative action program he had instituted. By 1972, Democrats had embraced racial preferences, Nixon was campaigning against the very program that he had created, and the flight of white, working-class voters from the Democrats to the Republicans was underway.

Steinberg's analysis is no more convincing when he comes to the post-civil rights era, which he sees largely as a backlash against affirmative action led by liberals or erstwhile liberals. The leading rogue is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the assistant secretary of labor under Lyndon Johnson and author of the report, The Negro Family. Steinberg accuses Moynihan of subverting Johnson's celebrated 1965 address at Howard University, which Moynihan co-authored with Richard Goodwin. The pair wrote that America should go beyond equal opportunity to "equal results," but then with "Machiavellian genius" they steered Johnson's speech away from the one "sure-fire method for achieving equal results: instituting a system of [racial] preference." Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, another erstwhile liberal, also led the charge against racial preference, Steinberg observes, publishing the influential critique, Affirmative Discrimination in 1975.

The views of Moynihan and Glazer were also adopted by black intellectuals, he says, like William Julius Wilson and Cornel West. Wilson's 1978 landmark, The Declining Significance of Race, gave cover to whites who wanted to argue that class had become a greater impediment to poor blacks than race--and that programs must be pitched in universal terms to be politically acceptable. And although West's 1993 collection of essays, Race Matters, might appear from the title to be a retort to Wilson's book, it carries substantially the same message.

Steinberg then mocks white politicians, particularly Bill Clinton, for echoing the "backlash" as a way of avoiding tough racial problems. But Steinberg has it backwards: American politicians usually talk about race as a way of avoiding more intractable class-based problems. Race is the American proxy for class, in part because it is in the interests of those in power to frame deep class divisions in racial terms, virtually assuring that they will not be discussed in a meaningful way.

Moreover, Steinberg's portrait of contemporary liberalism's "retreat from race" is completely at odds with the reality of the Democratic Party's continuing adherence to race-based remedies. Steinberg is right that a number of liberals have begun to question racial preferences. Joseph Califano, Jimmy Carter's secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, has criticized preferences in recent years, as has Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign manager. And there has been thoughtful criticism of racial preferences in The American Prospect, The New Republic, and the pages of this magazine.

But among Democratic politicians, opposition to racial preferences is not yet politically correct. We are now at a stage where a liberal Democratic lawmaker can complain to U.S. News & World Report: "I'll be goddamned why the son of a wealthy black businessman should have a slot reserved for that race when the son of a white autoassembly worker is excluded." But we are not at the point where that Democrat will risk being identified. Among Democratic officials, Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman is a lonely voice in opposition to race-based affirmative action. Indeed, at the end of the day, every one of Steinberg's "villains"--West, Wilson, Moynihan, even Glazer--supports racial preferences.

And Bill Clinton, of course, has turned out to be a stalwart supporter of affirmative action. While Steinberg could not have known the conclusion of the President's review of affirmative action policies at the time the book went to print, Clinton had given ample evidence in his first two years in office of just how comfortable he is with race-based decision making. Clinton's highly public commitment to diversity in his cabinet was followed by a fateful decision, in July 1994, to push the frontiers of affirmative action to untested limits. Clinton said he supported the firing of an equally qualified white school teacher in Piscataway, New Jersey, not as a remedy for past discrimination, but in order to promote faculty diversity. Clinton is only willing to concede that angry white males are having a hard time psychologically. His implication is that they have no legitimate beef when their skin color is used against them; he seems to say that all they need is a good shrink. In the modern era liberals have retreated some from the rhetoric of race, but they still largely support race-based policies.

Despite the book's fundamental flaws, Turning Back does contain some interesting insights. Steinberg notes, for example, that the "white backlash" of the 1960s cannot be implicitly justified as a response to rioting and the excesses of the Black Power movement. George Wallace's strong showing in Northern Democratic primaries in 1964 preceded those events, and was a response to the antidiscriminatory laws passed by Congress. And Steinberg is right to criticize Myrdal's widely revered text on race in America. Steinberg asks: "What are we to think of a book--heralded as a classic--whose title reduces racial oppression to a `dilemma'?"

But in the end, Steinberg's broader case is simply too hard to make. In the internal debate about race and class, Steinberg and his allies are not struggling; they are winning. While there are strong undercurrents of opposition to racial preferences on the left, there has been no grand public retreat from them, much less from race generally. During President Clinton's review of affirmative action policies earlier this year, civil rights groups weighed in forcefully, while the traditional representative of class interests--organized labor--was largely irrelevant.

In fact, it is precisely because Steinberg and his allies have largely won the debate that the left finds itself in such a mess today. Democrats have strongly opposed California's Civil Rights Initiative, for example, which is designed to eliminate race and gender preferences. Instead of pointing out that the real inequalities in America today are based on class--and that the most intelligent social policy would target people based on their disadvantaged background, riot the color of their skin--too many liberals are stuck defending a strategy that is antiquated and poisonous. This is a sad fact, and one for which liberals are likely to pay more and more dearly at the polls. Then we shall see the true meaning of the phrase "turning back."

Richard D. Kahlenberg is writing a book about class-based affirmative action for Basic Books.