IT'S AT ODDS WITH THE REAL WORLD

Most cancers, while not curable, respond to treatment with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Each of these procedures exacts a price in pain and suffering. Racism is the cancer on the American body politic. There are no sure cures, and treatments specifically calling for the inclusion of those long barred by reason of race can be painful.

This connection is lost on Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, who choose to magnify gains blacks have made and minimize the sizable gaps that remain. Black progress has been neglected, they tell us, while poverty, unemployment, welfare dependency and crime have been exaggerated in order to feed "the mix of black anger and white shame and guilt that sustains the race-based social policies implemented since the late 1960s."

For those blacks not immersed in well-compensated denial, this stance is dangerous nonsense. Racial hostility, now as ever, is worsened by poverty among blacks and job anxiety among whites. And it mounts with steadily growing disparities in income and wealth, regardless of race.

William Julius Wilson's important book, When Work Disappears, identifies the lack of jobs as the key to black poverty and social disarray. The Thernstroms dismiss Wilson's work as simply "plausible." Some blacks have made it, they note; let those on the bottom emulate these role models. But even those blacks who have achieved are bitter about the racism they faced on the road to success. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, reminded that his people had come a long way, responded, "But so have other people come a long way...People say we are better off today. Better than what?"

The barriers of race may be less blatant, but they are no less formidable. Hailing a change in racism's form as its eradication may provide short-term comfort. But it ensures rather than avoids long-term disaster.

DERRICK BELL, a professor at New York University, wrote Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.