The road less traveled: a white man tackles white power.(Tim Wise)

Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White and White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

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IN 1989, JACKIE OLIVE, now an intern with the Independent Television Service, was completing her graduate studies in documentary filmmaking at the University of Florida and working in the school's Office of Graduate Minority Programs. As she tells it, she was an example of the overachieving, overqualified Black student who could only afford to pursue a graduate degree because affirmative action admissions came with cash. "How are students like me looking to go to college this fall going to pay for it," asks Olive, "when these programs are being undermined all over the country?"

Olive's bleak take is understandable. Voters in three states have banned affirmative action programs. Now, Ward Connerly's "civil rights initiatives," as he calls them, are upcoming on ballots in Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado and South Dakota. Since Connerly's appeal to white voters' sense of fair play keeps winning, revisiting the work of white racial justice activist Tim Wise may help forge a better strategy for the fall elections.

White's 2005 book Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White was an attempt to beat back the "tell the white people what they want to hear" strategy that activists used against Connerly in California and Washington State. That approach lost. While the extensive data cited in Affirmative Action--from statistics showing how negligible the impact of affirmative action policies has been on whites to those refuting the myth that applicants of color are less qualified/prepared/apt to succeed--make the book academically acceptable, it is the conclusions Wise states so simply that give the book its real power.

"The arguments blaming [B]lack cultural traits for educational underachievement ... remain inaccurate and rooted in racist stereotypes," he wrote. "It is testimony to how entrenched racism and racist thinking are in this nation that ... attempts at blaming the victims have been so successful, despite the utter lack of evidence to support [this] position."

Wise's next book, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, continues his no-holds-barred attack on white liberal notions that it's ...