U-turn on affirmative action.

The Anatomy of
Racial Inequality
Glenn Loury
Harvard University Press, $22.95, 219 pp.

At the center of Glenn Loury's argument in this dense, difficult, and challenging book is the concept of "racial stigma." That concept is best understood through a simple analogy.

"What," Loury writes, "could be more arbitrary than the coordinating convention, stop on 'red' and go on 'green'? It would surely work just as well the other way around--stop on 'green' and go on 'red.' The particular colors being used here can have no intrinsic significance. Still, it is not difficult to imagine that, in time, 'red' might...become imbued with a sense of prohibition, and 'green' with a sense of license. Once this were so, it would then be difficult to use those symbols in any other way, despite the arbitrariness of their initial designation."

In fact, that is exactly what has happened with those two colors. "Give him the green light for that project." "Give them the red light before they really get going."

So it is, Loury contends, with race in the American context, where the analogous colors are black and almost anything else. Skin color has no intrinsic significance; it signifies nothing essential about the person beneath the skin. But, says Loury, "the symbols we call 'race' have through time been infused with social meanings bearing on the identity, the status, and the humanity of those who carry them."

For black Americans, these infused social meanings have all been negative, to the point that they "undermine an observing agent's ability to see [the] bearer as a person possessing a common humanity with the observer--as 'someone not unlike the rest of us.'" Such a person, such a people, Loury says, is racially stigmatized.

In Loury's view, racial stigmatization, which is intimately tied up with black Americans' unique history as chattel slaves, is the key to the seemingly intractable social, economic, and other deficits that blacks suffer disproportionately in comparison with other Americans. And it is the reason that extraordinary remedial measures--race-conscious measures such as affirmative action--remain both necessary and justified.

If it seems strange to hear of Glenn Loury defending affirmative action, it's probably because you're recalling an earlier Glenn Loury. In the early to mid-1980s, after he became the first tenured black member of the economics department at Harvard, Loury was the scourge of the civil rights establishment and a darling of neoconservatives. He wrote widely in criticism of affirmative action and other such race-conscious devices--and in criticism of traditional civil rights leaders. They were, Loury contended, so fixated on the enemy without--white racism--that they were blind to the enemy within: the self-destructive behaviors of the black poor that had created a huge and growing "underclass" in the nation's cities.

Those must have been heady times for the young black wunderkind who had grown up on Chicago's South Side and very nearly squandered his own promise before earning an undergraduate degree at Northwestern University and a doctorate in economics at MIT.

But, to borrow an analogy from Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, Loury may have been impressing his neoconservative admirers and patrons by talking like the Apostle Paul during the day, but he was still "Saulin' around" at night and on the side. Unknown apparently to anyone else, Loury was involved in an affair with a student and had developed a drug habit. Only after Ronald Reagan nominated him as undersecretary of education in 1987 did the sordid truth come out in sordid fashion.

Loury managed to save his marriage, beat his addiction, and recover his academic career. He also changed his academic affiliation--moving in 1991 from Harvard to Boston University--and his political stance on some key racial issues, affirmative action among them. In this respect, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is something of a coming-out party for a new Glenn Loury, one more in tune with black civil rights orthodoxy.

Calling his book "a meditation on the problem of racial inequality in the United States," he says that it was motivated by "one overriding reality": "Nearly a century and a half after the destruction of the institution of slavery, and a half-century past the dawn of the civil rights movement, social life in the United States continues to be characterized by significant racial stratification."

This sounds suspiciously like the oft-heard mantra of some black leaders that "nothing has changed." That, of course, is plainly, demonstrably false. The America we inhabit today is radically different, radically improved racially from what it was in 1965, or 1975, or 1990. Changes that have swept away legal barriers to equality have brought blacks--and the nation--closer to the philosophical ideals professed in our founding documents. Almost a full decade of unparalleled economic growth, along with more than three decades of affirmative action in education, employment, and other realms, have helped create a genuine, durable black middle class. As other writers such as Ellis Cose have observed, blacks now can rise--and have risen--to positions at the very top of American business, if not yet of politics.

So it cannot be seriously maintained that nothing has changed. And while Loury may be right when he says there is "no scientific basis upon which to rest the prediction that a rough parity of socioeconomic status for African Americans will be realized in the foreseeable future," who says you need to be able to predict it scientifically for it to be possible, or even probable? The civil rights movement never would have happened if a scientific probability of success had been required.

Still, Loury is not just blowing smoke when he talks about a persistent inequality. He demonstrates it graphically with a thirty-page appendix of charts, tables, and graphs, showing disparities between blacks and whites in income, wealth, health, family structure, and other measures of the good life, the American dream.

Interestingly, though, the area most neglected in the appendix is the one in which the black/white inequality arguably is greatest and most pernicious. That's the justice system. If there is an area of our national life of which it can plausibly be said that nothing has changed, the justice system is it.

By virtually every statistical measure, blacks--and especially black men--take the brunt of the criminal justice system. They are arrested, tried, convicted, imprisoned, and sentenced to death in far greater proportions than their numbers in the population would justify. And that, as Loury says, ought to be a cause for concern and soul-searching.

At the bottom of this persistent inequality, Loury says, is the phenomenon of racial stigma. It derives from America's peculiar historical institution, chattel slavery. References to slavery make modern white Americans uncomfortable and impatient, Loury observes, but "much rests on my conviction that the history of slavery in America casts a long shadow, one with contemporary relevance."

Indeed, almost everything rests on that conviction, and the reason for it is fascinating, involving as it does a discussion of the work of Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, and of the concept of "dishonor, shown so brilliantly by Patterson to be a general and defining feature of slavery." This discussion is one of the most valuable parts of Loury's book.

It leads him to conclude that, in a society like ours, where racial stigmatization is deep and enduring, it is foolish, absurd, and ahistorical to aspire to a "colorblind" ideal of racial justice, where taking account of race for remedial purposes is treated as morally no different than invidious racial discrimination. The proper ideal of racial justice, the one to which Americans ought to aspire, Loury says, is "race egalitarianism," which means taking account of race through devices like affirmative action to achieve equality.

Not only does such an ideal pay appropriate tribute to the principle that race signifies no essential difference among peoples, but it also shows due regard for the way our unique American racial history has skewed the balance of wealth and developed skills and opportunity among our various peoples.

Loury's position has everything to recommend it intellectually--it is honest, aboveboard, respectful of history and the inequities it has created. The problem is that it doesn't take realistic account of human nature, and of the fact that, in a democracy, a majority of the people will not support indefinitely any policy that puts them at a competitive disadvantage with others, no matter how grievous the wrongs those others may have suffered. The legal efforts to end affirmative action at places such as the University of Texas and the University of Michigan are proof of that.

Nevertheless, Loury has made a powerful intellectual contribution to this ongoing debate. I found myself wondering at times whether he might, because of his personal political history, be trying just a bit too hard with some of his arguments, overcompensating to establish his bona fides now as an orthodox civil rights thinker. But whether he is or not, finally it is his arguments that must be contended with.

Don Wycliff is public editor of the Chicago Tribune.