ensus Bureau is now pointing out, about how individuals should be counted. And as intermarriage proliferates among all those groups, who s to say how their offspring should be counted? Should the son of an Argentinian immigrant, now a corporate executive in San Diego (or a Cuban in Miami), get preference as a Latino? How do you classify a student with a hyphenated name, half Hispanic and half Jewish? Why do we give preference to the child of the black doctor and none to the child of the Appalachian coal miner?
Historian Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University points out that the most overlooked law of the civil rights era, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which ended the system of national-origins quotas in U.S. immigration policy, had enormous consequences that we still don t fully comprehend. Although its sponsors claimed that it Would produce little significant increase in immigration, it brought to the country more than 20 million legal immigrants during the thirty years after its enactment, approximately 75 percent of whom  qualified upon arrival for minority-group preferences over Americans whose citizenship Cached back many generations.  Surely that was rt t justified by any effort to remedy past injustices. Surely that was not part of any tacit bargain to which the country ever agreed.
$tRains of Ambivalence
But does even that certify the wisdom of a deci-sion that would, virtually overnight, impose the across-the-board prohibitions on race preferences that the opponents of affirmative action are now demanding? Or does it make more sense politi-cal, social, moral to return to the limited (Bakke)
version of affirmative action, messy as it often was, to which the country seemed to give its consent a generation ago and which it may still be willing to accept? To return to polls for a moment: If the question is changed from an either-or choice about explicit race preferences to more general matters about affirmative action, the answers change as well. In a USA Today/CNN poll this spring, 73 percent said they favor companies  making special efforts to find qualified minorities and women.  Similar answers are given to questions about special training programs for minorities and women. The vast majority of respondents, white and black, don t believe that the country has been purged of racial discrimination. On a general question about affirmative action programs on the USA Today poll, 31 percent favored expansion, 37 percent favored a decrease, and 26 percent thought they should be kept about the same.
It may be impossible to fully articulate that ambivalence, much less write it into policy. But with the stakes as high as they are on this issue, it surely deserves the effort. Considerations in the appointment of scholars for a research university may not apply to the hiring of heavy-equipment operators or postal clerks. What applies to contracting with small businesses, regardless of the race and gender of their owners, may not apply to large corporations. And what may apply to some colleges may not apply to others. Many states have created two- or three-tiered higher education systems to serve both merit and inclusion a highly selective university combined with readily accessible junior colleges and moderately selective four-year state colleges. Why should that principle be compromised by tempering admission standards for the selective institutions in order to further inclusion there as well?
hich brings the issue back to a more basic question: What is merit and to what extent are existing criteria merit-based? In the past year there has been a bitter fight in Chicago over the promotion of a hand-fill of black cops who were ranked high on  merit  even though they scored lower on the civil service exam than some officers over whom they were promoted. In that case, either the word  merit  is fatuous or it raises serious questions about just what the exam measures. Admissions officers at colleges raise the same issue when they defend affirmative action by arguing that test scores aren t good predictors of performance in college. But if that s the case, why use the test at all?
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9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
Chances are that it s not the case. As the neoconservatives some of whom defected from liberalism precisely over this issue will tell you, the whole point of such tests was to foster merit against spoils systems at city hall and good-old-boy bias in the admission office at Yale. Ethnic spoils are no more acceptable now than the earlier varieties. In any case, nobody has yet shown what would be a better predictor of academic success for minorities.
And yet that hardly vitiates the general proposition: In many of the areas affected by public-sector racial preferences, there may be better ways of making choices than those we use now. If only court-ordered make-whole remedies to proven discrimination are permissible (which is what the opponents of race preferences advocate), how many more civil rights lawsuits would be filed that are now averted by voluntary action? Would any public employer, recognizing past discrimination, have to encourage a lawsuit before the victims could be made whole? Can race sometimes even be regarded in practice, not in law as part of the qualifications for certain jobs? If you seek out people not just for their technical knowledge, or their test-taking skills, but for their ability to deal with and be trusted in a community, why shouldn t ethnicity be a  plus factor  in the package?
The answers are hardly self-evident. None of these questions should suggest that it s proper for the police chief in Grosse Pointe to hire only white cops. This area doesn t lend itself well to across-the-board legal rules; it s better to build in flexibility and room to fudge. If there is a flat ban on any consideration of race in public policy, what happens to efforts to foster integration in elementary and secondary schools? John Bunzel, a former member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a sharp critic of the excesses of race preferences, has declined to support measures like CCRI which, he says, are too blunt; they simplify, and  I m a complexifier.  Shouldn t there be room at the margins, he asks, for ethnic diversity among all the other criteria? And that, of course is what the Supreme Court s Bakke decision, with all its flaws, sought to do.
Six Alternative Principles
It s not an easy task. Yet surely before the country is forced to a set of either-or choices, some alternative principles are worth considering:
1.	The more sophisticated the enterprise or skill for which candidates are chosen, the more important merit becomes and the weaker the claims for non-meritocratic criteria. The kind of considerations we
give in selecting people for blue-collar jobs not be the same as the ones given to selectin uate students in nuclear physics or brain s The public junior college, by mandate, def and tradition, is more inclusive than the Ii for Advanced Study. Thomas Sowell makes suasive argument that the issue is not so mu should go to college but where. The frustrat tensions not to mention the various dist that have been created on many campi accommodate marginal students result ft effort to bring people into academic situat! which they are not qualified. As a result, eve who are qualified are suspect and discredits
2.	In public as well as private enterprises, ty may well be a legitimate business consia Where the choice is between candidates tractors with similar bids or equal qualifies skill, doesn t it make sense to consider fir who come from underrepresented groups a will for that reason be more effective or n enterprise more legitimate with clients community? In such choices, the lines of c sense, if they can be maintained, are better lines drawn by law.
3.	In college admission, economic disadvi a more legitimate extra factor for a borderhi date than membership in a preferred racih Why not shift the emphasis in affirmativ from minorities to children from families v one has ever gone to college? Such poli< well result in smaller proportions of b Hispanics at selective universities, at lea: short run, but it may have a far greatc impact. And unlike race preferences, econ< advantage will not become a permanent ment. As such, it s far more consistent nation s historic principles. And to the ex race preferences are forgotten, so will i assumptions about how minority stude: accepted. What will become clear is the in secondary school preparation, or worse, th the underrepresentation in the first place.
4.	All race preferences in publ* activities in contracting, hiring, an< tion should be made fully public and s time limits and periodic public review by tive, nonpartisan process. "We have alret aged to do away with one of the most re ble practices: race-norming, the system rately ranking candidates within their ox groups on Labor Department job tests a: from the top of each list. The expectation be that we will gradually do away wit! many more in coming years. An obvior
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47. So You Want to be Color-Blind
begin is to make affirmative action goals and the administrative definitions of disparate impact more flexible.
5.	Exclude all foreign-born residents, citizens, and diens, and perhaps even the children of immigrants, from race preferences, excepting only children of American citizens who were living abroad. There is no history of discrimination to justify such preferences. And they generate no end of resentment, as the passage of California s Proposition 187, the measure designed to deny social services to illegal aliens, has demonstrated.
6.	Vigorously enforce anti-discrimination law, not perhaps to the point of criminalizing discrimination as Shelby Steele proposes, but far more vigorously than we do now, and systematically review all publicsector merit systems to make certain that tests and other criteria are tn fact appropriate to the tasks and positions for which they're used.
This is hardly a complete list, much less an ideal one. But it recognizes that affirmative action even
race preference has different meanings depending on the context, and that flexibility is critical. Affirmative action bears a heavy burden against the claims of real merit; where it favors rich over poor, strong over weak, it bears an insurmountable one. Yet rigid rules are likely to take us into a thicket of legal combat and social division more bitter than anything generated by the policies we have now. If the Democrats, rather than standing frozen in the headlights of the approaching disaster, were to try to articulate a third alternative, they might well reclaim some credibility on the issue.
The sense of a national moral imperative that once sustained affirmative action is rapidly eroding. It is only a matter of time before it s all gone. In those circumstances a soft landing no phrase could be more appropriate in this context would surely be better than a yes-or-no choice whose answer will almost certainly be no. But unless those who regard themselves as people of good will offer a third alternative, that s the answer we ll get.
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Article 48
Goin  Gangsta, Choosin  Cholita
Teens today "claim" a racial identity
Nell Bernstein
WEST MAGAZINE
Nell Bernstein is editor of YO! (Youth Outlook), a Bay Area journal of teen life produced by Pacific News Service. Subscriptions: $12 youngpeoplel$75 supporter!yr. (6 issues) from Pacific News Service, 450 Mission St., Room 506, San Francisco, CA 94105.
Her lipstick is dark, the lip liner even darker, nearly black. In baggy pants, a blue plaid Pendleton, her bangs pulled back tight off her forehead, 15-year-old April is a perfect cholita, a Mexican gangsta girl.
But April Miller is Anglo.  And I don t like it!  she complains.  I d rather be Mexican. 
April s father wanders into the family room of their home in San Leandro, California, a