Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action and American Values by Christopher Edley Jr. Farra, Straus and Giroux, 1996 New York 294 pages Hardback: $25.00

Increasingly, affirmative action has become a commanding issue in our nation's political life. In the early months of the recent presidential campaign, Republican candidates, looking to boost their campaigns by tapping into supposed voter dissatisfaction with such policies, loudly opposed affirmative action programs. Yet both California Governor Pete Wilson and U.S. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, leading the loudest attacks on affirmative action, failed to draw any national momentum from the issue, and their presidential candidacies quickly died.

While such political opportunism failed to boost anti-affirmative action presidential candidates, the success in last fall's elections of California Proposition 209, which bans racial and gender preferences in state government, has brought forth a more profound and significant challenge to affirmative action policies.

Passage of the referendum has drawn the opposition of civil rights groups, which convinced a federal judge in California to block implementation of the new law after he declared that it was probably unconstitutional. However, the judge was overturned by a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco which ruled the proposition constitutional. Civil rights groups have asked the court to allow the order to block implementation of the proposal to remain in place while the case is appealed, and the U.S. Department of justice has announced that it will join efforts to block Proposition 209's implementation to prevent it from undermining federal civil rights policy.

As affirmative action continues to make headlines in 1997, some analysts and thinkers hope the debate will help the American people to consider the hard choices about race within our national policies and private practices. When complicated disputes arise -- as demonstrated by the struggle between California and the federal government -- citizens ought to have a clear understanding of the laws, policies and values at stake. But helping citizens to gain clear understanding of issues is not something anyone should expect from politicians in the midst of a political fight.