"Help Yourself"

I hate to admit it, but the battle over affirmative action in higher education is over, and Ward Connerly won. The developments at the University of California since Connerly's Proposition 209 banned racial preferences will be repeated all over the nation if similar laws are adopted in such states as Texas and Florida, where Connerly, the Pied Piper of color blindness, plans to bring his crusade. But despite the moans you will hear from supporters of affirmative action, it may not be such a bad thing. It could force African Americans to rediscover a piece of mother wit: if you want to succeed in America, you have to be twice as prepared as your white counterpart. Anything less won't do.

Figuring out how black youngsters can rekindle that old-fashioned pride is a preoccupation of Rene Redwood, who is resigning this week as executive director of Americans for a Fair Chance, a Washington-based coalition of six civil rights and women's organizations that support affirmative action. Her departure is a big loss for the pro-affirmative action crowd, because Redwood, 43, a former executive director of the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, has been such a forceful advocate. She still is. But she thinks her allies need new tactics to have any chance of winning over enough public support to preserve the policy.

Redwood says both sides have turned the argument over affirmative action into "a false debate that doesn't deal with the real problems." On one hand, there is what she calls "white noise" from Connerly and his ilk, who have defined the issue in terms of racial preferences instead of equal opportunity for women and minorities. On the other, there is the unwillingness of some affirmative-action proponents to look hard at blacks' lagging performance on standardized tests.

Suppose that in the three decades since affirmative action has been in place, middle-class black students had brought their SAT scores up to those of whites. We wouldn't be arguing about whether letting more blacks into the best colleges meant lowering standards. But between 1988 and 1998, the gap between average black and white SAT scores widened slightly, from 189 points to 194 points. To Redwood, that is a warning that something has gone terribly wrong with the way we are schooling our children. It's a crisis that affirmative action simply cannot resolve.

It pains her, but when Redwood talks about why this has happened, she sounds a bit like Connerly. "Sometime in the 1980s, a sense of entitlement began to replace blacks' sense of doing things for ourselves," she contends. "We started getting away from the values I was raised with--you should not bring a child into the world unless you were prepared to care for it; you had to be twice as good as whites; nothing less than an A was good enough." That erosion in values, Redwood believes, is a major cause of the "performance gap" that has undercut white support for affirmative action. "I believe that you should not expect anyone to help you until you've done everything you can to help yourself," says Redwood. "While we continue to fight against discrimination, we need to do whatever it takes to improve education from kindergarten through high school so that black children are able to compete on an equal basis." To me, that seems like common sense.