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.

In his book, Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action and American Values, Harvard University law school professor Christopher Edley Jr. sets his sights on helping readers "better understand why the affirmative action, and racial justice debates generally, are so difficult."

The professor wants readers to grasp the fundamental values that underlie the affirmative action debate. For example, the age-old tension between the ideal of limited government and the vision of activist government represents part of the values struggle inherent to the affirmative action debate, according to the author.

Few individuals bring as much academic and government experience to the task of appraising affirmative action as Edley. A veteran of two national presidential campaigns and former political appointee in the Carter and Clinton administrations, Edley knows the political realities accompanying the current battles over affirmative action better than most. Having a sensible debate about affirmative action is what Edley believes will lead to the most appropriate policies. He draws upon his experience in government to guide us through that debate.

"People intensely concerned about affirmative action ... whether for or against ... rarely work hard to understand the arguments on both sides and to figure out how to persuade others," declares Edley, who labors to help the readers understand arguments on both sides by carefully evaluating each position early on in his book.

His six-month appointment in 1995 as Special Counsel to the President to manage a White House review on affirmative action forms the basis for the book. He has described the process of writing the book as similar to briefing President Bill Clinton during the White House review.

Clinton, who ordered the White House review, defended affirmative action before a national television audience with the "Mend it, don't end it" speech on July 19, 1995 at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Edley, who takes a certain pride in Clinton's defense, sees the speech as an achievement for the White House review on affirmative action.

Edley advises, "The first order of business is not to pick a side and mobilize arguments in support of it, but rather to investigate why an important policy debate has the structure that it does and why the choice is hard."

He outlines three contemporary perspectives on affirmative action which include: the color-blind vision; the opportunity/anti-discrimination vision; and the remediation plus inclusion vision.

The race-neutral, color-blind vision objects to affirmative action policies that use race-conscious decision-making except in very narrow remedial circumstances. In other words, the color-blind vision would prohibit affirmative action programs that used race as a criteria in decision-making to award opportunity. In situations where discrimination was proven to have an impact on a specific victim or group of victims, the color-blind vision would then permit race-conscious remedial action. Its supporters advocate that race-neutral opportunity programs replace race-conscious measures.

According to Edley, conservatives have begun to promote class-based and geography-based opportunity programs as an alternative to affirmative action policies with racial and gender preferences. However, he says one of the shortcomings of the conservative approach to the color-blind vision is when conservatives "say that race-conscious measures should be abandoned in favor of race-neutral social welfare measures, and in the very same breath they attack those same measures for being ineffective and undeserving of fiscal support, if not indeed contrary to some set of principles about the proper role of government."

The opportunity/anti-discrimination vision described by Edley advances the notion that race-conscious decision-making is justified to remedy past discrimination. Policies resulting from this vision allows that "race may be one among several factors used flexibly to remedy discrimination and to promote equal opportunity where past or societal discrimination has diminished opportunity."

The vision of remediation plus inclusion goes somewhat further than opportunity/anti-discrimination by saying that race-conscious decision-making not only should remedy past discrimination but it should boost diversity and inclusion in institutions where racial exclusion may not have resulted from past discrimination. Edley cites President Clinton's 1992 pledge to make his Cabinet "look like America" as an example of the remediation plus inclusion vision.

According to Edley, inclusion is thus viewed as a means to improve the performance of an organization, government agency or business. Inclusion or diversity means an urban police force would hire minority officers to become more representative of the community it serves, and thus more effective. It also means that an institution brings in minorities or women to benefit from their input and diverse perspectives.

Overall, Edley has written a useful book in helping us to understand why the affirmative action debate is a critical and highly complex one. Readers will find Not All Black and White particularly valuable because it provides an informed view of the struggle over affirmative action, and how it relates to the gap between the races in America.