THROWING THE BOOK AT RACE

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What best symbolizes black progress--and white resistance--in America is the march. Haggard slaves marched north, using moonlight and north-facing moss to get to freedom. Years later, regiments of blacks again marched north, this time in the great migration, drawn by jobs and away from Jim Crow. In the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the most poignant images were of the march: from Selma to Montgomery, then to Washington and the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr. tell of a dream. New laws signaled the next campaign: blacks and whites heading toward an integrated, egalitarian society.

But decades later, Americans have not crossed their Jordan. In fact, for all the effort to make the racial issue irrelevant, it has become more pervasive and indelible. Last week a California law forbidding the use of affirmative action in state programs went into effect; movements to pass similar laws are afoot in other states and in Congress. One harbinger of that change: at state law schools in Texas and California, the end of preferences has meant classes with single-digit numbers of blacks. And as the Supreme Court prepares for next month's new session, its most anticipated case is one that could abolish affirmative action outright.

Into this fray comes America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster; $32.50) by noted Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom and his scholar wife Abigail. The couple are the latest in a string of former liberals come round to denounce affirmative action. But unlike more polemical authors, the Thernstroms pin their arguments to seven years of research, modeling their approach on Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 benchmark racial survey, An American Dilemma. Their prose is cool, not overheated, and their 704-page book is stuffed with tables, charts and graphs tracking black progress over the past 60 years.

Already, prepublication, the book is causing a stir. Christopher Edley, President Clinton's point man on the "mend it, don't end it" approach to affirmative action, published a rebuttal in Harvard magazine in July. Kirkus Reviews has declared the book "likely to be seen as the benchmark scholarly study of America's current anguish over the race question." The New Republic is planning an excerpt.

So what exactly does the book posit? The cornerstone premise for the Thernstroms is that things are not so bad as they seem, that both blacks and whites are better than, and different from, their stereotypes. Whites, they argue, are mischaracterized as a racist monolith, when in fact polls show a different picture. Whites surveyed in the 1940s wanted firm separation of the races, but by 1994 a majority told pollsters they have blacks as neighbors and close friends; at least a third say they have had blacks over for dinner.