Be afraid. Be very afraid. Affirmative action does not merely lead to mass murder and civil war--that's just for starters. Before long, bridges will collapse and planes will plummet from the sky, and every time they do you'll know that some incompetent affirmative action hire is to blame.

Why, then, has the private sector gradually embraced affirmative action, with all these incompetent minorities eating away at our social infrastructure? Here's Sowell's stab at an explanation:

Court decisions legitimizing affirmative action under prescribed conditions then provided businesses with a set of guidelines that could minimize their legal jeopardy. Therefore, when efforts were made to end group preferences and quotas during the 1980s by some within the Reagan administration, big business support for the continuation of affirmative action helped doom the efforts to rescind it.

What in the world does "therefore" mean in this passage? Sure, minimal "legal jeopardy" is good, but wouldn't no legal jeopardy be better? Dodging this question, Sowell then writes, "In addition, large corporations tend to have their own internal affirmative action officials and departments, with their own vested interests in the continuation of such policies." Aha, those vested interests. The idea that large corporations might not want to be seen as racist or sexist employers, like the idea that large corporations really mean it when they say that affirmative action has given them a deeper pool of efficient employees, seems never to have crossed Sowell's mind.

What social scientists will find most puzzling--or galling--about Sowell's book, though, is his dogged insistence that affirmative action has never been tested empirically, that there are no studies of its effects, no cost/benefit analyses of its policies. Faye Crosby's latest work, Affirmative Action Is Dead; Long Live Affirmative Action, provides a compact, ready-to-hand rebuttal of claims like these, crammed as it is with studies, surveys, assessments and a battery of psychological and attitudinal tests. At the same time, Crosby's book might also stand as an index of the naïveté of some of the people devising those tests. She repeatedly professes bewilderment at opposition to affirmative action: "Why, I wonder, has affirmative action in employment and education not been universally and vigorously supported in the United States?"

Perhaps Crosby's profession of puzzlement is merely for rhetorical effect, but it's hard to imagine how any researcher could wonder aloud why white guys, who'd once competed for college placements, jobs and promotions with about 44 percent of the population, might resist policies that put them in competition with the other 60 percent. And Crosby seems to think that many people oppose affirmative action largely because they're misinformed about it: "For some time I have had no doubt that much of the resistance to affirmative action is based on misconceptions about the policy.... The policy implications of this conclusion would seem to be clear. Just teach people how affirmative action really operates, and the controversy will die down." Really? Crosby herself seems unsure of this. Although she says that for many Republicans and libertarians, "opposition to policies that resemble affirmative action derives more from a dislike of government intervention than from racial prejudice," she also concedes that "for overt and covert racists and sexists, the knowledge that affirmative action benefits those who have been previously excluded or oppressed may be what bothers them about the policy." But I doubt any of this is news in 2005. At the close of her book, Crosby proposes experiments that test people's support for affirmative action relative to their ideas about justice, but it's a mystery to me why she didn't devise those experiments and conduct them herself.

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