On the other hand, I believe that the study of affirmative action has been too much the preserve of lawyers and philosophers, and has too little engaged the interests of economists and other social scientists. For although departures from color-blind absolutism are both legitimate and desirable in some circumstances, there are compelling reasons to question the wisdom of relying as heavily as we now do on racial preferences to bring about civic inclusion for African Americans.

To begin with, the widespread use of preferences can logically be expected to erode the perception of black competence. This argument is not a speculation about the feelings of persons who may or may not be the beneficiaries of affirmative action. Rather, it turns on the rational, statistical inferences that neutral observers are entitled to make about the unknown qualifications of persons who may have been preferred, or rejected, in a selection process.

Another reason for skepticism about affirmative action is that it can undercut the incentives for blacks to develop their competitive abilities. For instance, preferential treatment can lead to the patronization of black workers and students that is, the setting of a lower standard of expected accomplishment for blacks than whites because of the belief that blacks are not as capable of meeting a higher, common standard. Behavior of this kind can be based on a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, observed performance among blacks may be lower precisely because blacks are being patronized a policy undertaken because of the requirement for an employer, admissions officer or personnel manager to meet affirmative action guidelines.

Consider a workplace in which a supervisor operating under such guidelines must recommend subordinate workers for promotion. Let's presume he seeks to promote blacks where possible, monitors workers performances and bases his recommendations upon these observations. Pressure to promote blacks might lead him to de-emphasize deficiencies in the performance of black subordinates, recommending them for promotion when he would not have done so for whites with similar ratings. But his behavior could undermine the ability of black workers to identify and correct their deficiencies encouraging them to think they can get ahead without reaching the same level of proficiency as their white co-workers.

A similar situation can arise among applicants for admission to professional graduate schools. If most institutions of higher learning eager to admit a certain percentage of blacks accept black applicants with test scores and grades below those of some whites whom they reject, the message to black students is that the level of performance needed to gain admission is lower than that which whites know they must attain. If black and white students turn out to be responsive to these differing expectations, they might, as a result, achieve grades and test scores reflective of the expectation gap. In this way, the schools belief that different admissions standards are necessary becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The common theme in these two cases is that the desire to see greater black representation is achieved by using different criteria that reflect racial distinctions. This utilization, however, reduces incentives for blacks. I do not presume that blacks are less capable than whites in a given situation, but rather that an individual's responsibility to make use of his or her abilities is undermined by a policy of patronization by an employer or admissions panel.

One way to resolve or avoid this dilemma is for employers or schools to meet their desired level of black participation through a concerted effort to enhance performance while maintaining common standards of evaluation. Call it developmental, rather than preferential affirmative action. Such a targeted effort at performance enhancement among black workers or students is definitely not color-blind behavior. On the contrary, it presumes a direct concern about equality of opportunity for all races and involves allocating benefits to people on the basis of race. What distinguishes it from preferential treatment, though, is that it takes seriously the reality of differential performance and seeks to reverse it directly, rather than trying to hide from that fact by setting a different level of expectation for blacks performance.

For example, black students are far scarcer than white and Asian students in advanced studies in math and science. Encouraging their entry into these areas through summer workshops, support for curriculum development at historically black colleges, or the financing of research assistant grants for promising graduate students would be consistent with my distinction between the preferential and developmental approaches to affirmative action.

Also consistent would be the provision of management assistance to new black-owned businesses, which would then be expected to bid competitively for government contracts, or the provisional admission of black students to the state university conditional on a rise in their academic scores to competitive levels after a year or two of study at a local community college. The key is that the racially targeted assistance be short-lived, and preparatory to the entry of its recipients into an arena of competition where they would be assessed by the same standards as everyone else.

Unfortunately, economists seem to be the only people persuaded by, or even interested in, this kind of technical argument about affirmative action. So let me address a range of moral and political considerations that may be of broader popular interest yet still point in the same direction.

Let's begin with an obvious point: The plight of the inner-city underclass the most intractable aspect of the racial inequality problem today has not been mitigated by affirmative action policies, not even after a quarter-century of trying. Defenders of racial preferences respond by claiming this was never the intent of such policies. But this only leads to my second point: The persistent demand for preferential treatment as necessary to black achievement amounts, over a period of time, to a concession of defeat by middle-class blacks in our struggle for civic equality.

The political discourse over affirmative action harbors a paradoxical subtext: Middle- class blacks seek equality of status with whites by calling attention to their own limited achievements, thereby establishing the need for preferential policies. At the same time, sympathetic white elites, by granting black demands, thereby acknowledge that without their patronage, black penetration of the upper reaches of U.S. society would be impossible. The paradox is that although equality is the goal of the enterprise, this manifestly is not an exchange among equals, and can never be.

Members of the black middle class who argue that without some special dispensation, they cannot compete with whites are really flattering those whites while confirming their own weakness. And whites who think that societal wrongs mandate giving blacks the benefit of the doubt about their qualifications are exercising a noblesse oblige available only to the powerful.

This exchange between black weakness and white power has become a basic paradigm for progressive race relations in contemporary America. Blacks from privileged backgrounds now routinely engage in displaying non-achievement, mournfully citing the higher success rates of whites in one endeavor or another in order to gain leverage for their advocacy of preferential treatment. The fact that Asians from more modest backgrounds often achieve higher rates of success is not mentioned. But the limited ability of these more fortunate blacks to make inroads on their own can hardly go unnoticed.

It is morally unjustified and, to this African American, humiliating that preferential treatment based on race should become institutionalized for those of us now enjoying all of the advantages of middle-class life. The thought that my sons would come to see themselves as presumptively disadvantaged because of their race is unbearable to me. They are, in fact, among the richest young people of African descent anywhere on the globe. There is no achievement to which they cannot legitimately aspire. Whatever degree of success they attain in life, the fact that some of their ancestors were slaves and others faced outrageous bigotry will have little to do with it.

Indeed, those ancestors, with only a fraction of the opportunity, and with much of the power structure of the society arrayed against them, managed to educate their children, acquire land, found communal institutions, and mount a successful struggle for equal rights. The generation coming of age during the 1960s, now ensconced in the burgeoning black middle class, enjoy their status primarily because their parents and grandparents faithfully discharged their responsibilities. The benefits of affirmative action, whatever they may have been, pale in comparison to this inheritance.

My grandparents, with their siblings and cousins, left rural Mississippi for Chicago in the years after World War I. Facing incredible racial hostility, they nevertheless carved out a place for their children, who went on to acquire property and gain a toehold in the professions. For most middle-class blacks, this is a familiar story. Our forebears, from slavery onward, performed magnificently under harsh circumstances. It is time now that we and our children begin to do the same. It desecrates the memory of our enslaved ancestors to assert that, with our far greater freedoms, we middle-class blacks should now look to whites, of whatever political persuasion, to ensure that our dreams are realized.

The children of today's black middle class will live their lives in an era of equal opportunity. I recognize that merely by stating this simple fact I will enrage many people. I do not mean to assert that racial discrimination has disappeared. But I insist that the historic barriers to black participation in the political, social and economic life of the nation have been lowered dramatically over the past four decades, especially for the wealthiest 20 percent of the black population. Arguably, the time has now come for us to let go of the ready-made excuse that racism provides.

So too, it is time to accept responsibility for what we and our children do, and do not, achieve.

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Glenn C. Loury is professor of economics and director of the Institution on Race and Social Division at Boston University. This article is reprinted with permission of the author and The Public Interest, Number 127, Spring 1997, pp. 33-43, copyright 1997 by National Affairs, Inc.