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June 5, 2002 8:45 a.m. Color Lines A new book features the best conservative thinking on race relations.

t is a simple fact of American life that the Left is obsessed with race and can't stop talking about it, but only on the Right are interesting things actually said. Thursday's formal release of Beyond the Color Line, a collection of original papers published jointly by the Hoover Institution and the Manhattan Institute, certainly drives the point home.

Four years ago, a group of conservatives grew frustrated with Bill Clinton's Race Advisory Board for its willful neglect of their views. Headed by John Hope Franklin, the Clinton panel issued a tendentious report complaining about America's "system of racial hierarchy" and the "significant barriers to opportunity" facing non-whites. The report made no attempt to address the obvious economic, political, and social advances of minority groups. Nor did it try to grapple with the conservative critique of racial preferences. Instead, it sought merely to update the bleak outlook of LBJ's Kerner Commission for the 1990s.

So the conservatives convened their own commission, called the Citizens' Initiative on Race and Ethnicity. Members included Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice; Elaine Chao, who is now secretary of labor; Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity; Ward Connerly, the man who made California's Proposition 209 possible; Gerald Reynolds, who has since become head of the Department of Education's civil-rights office; and Shelby Steele, author of The Content of Our Character. They have now produced this volume, edited by the wife-and-husband team of Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, and it may be the most fair-minded assessment of American race relations currently available.

The book's 25 chapters cover a wide range of issues and contain a diversity of views: Steele on stigma; William Clark on residential segregation; James Q. Wilson on crime; Sally Satel on health and medical care; Thomas Sowell on discrimination and economics; Eugene Volokh on racial and ethnic classifications in the law; and Nelson Lund on antidiscrimination law.

What separates the Left and Right on these subject, at bottom, is how much weight each side gives to the effects of white racism. In an introduction to Beyond the Color Line, the Thernstroms acknowledge that white racism "has not entirely disappeared." But whatever gaps in racial equality remain have more to do with dysfunctional underclass culture and lousy urban schools than with The Man always trying to keep people down. The contributors to Beyond the Color Line do what so many liberals refuse: They credit the amazing progress the United States has made on race relations in just a generation.

"In the heyday of the civil-rights movement," say the Thernstroms, "those who fought for racial equality were optimists." They had good reason for this optimism, too, considering all the gains that minorities have made since then. Yet there seems to be an inverse relationship between the actual state of things and the mood of civil-rights activists: "Pessimism is strikingly pervasive in civil-rights circles today."

Back in the 1960s, conservatives failed to confront the reality of racial oppression; today, liberals fail to recognize the reality of racial progress. Here's another way of looking at it: On one side of the political spectrum, we see a positive evolution toward an improved understanding of American unity, and on the other, a full-on retreat into headstrong blindness.