BOOK REVIEW : Lawyer Measures Value of Racial Quotas : Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby <i> by Stephen L. Carter</i> , Basic Books, $22.95, 276 pages

Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter was only 30 when he was granted tenure, one of the youngest faculty members ever to achieve that cherished badge of academic distinction. Yet Carter concedes that he was admitted to Yale Law School in the first place only because of “the color of my skin.”

“I may embrace this truth as a matter of simple justice or rail against it as one of life’s great evils,” Carter writes, “but being a member of the affirmative action generation means that the one thing I cannot do is deny it.”

Such courage and candor is much in evidence in his authoritative, well-considered, even elegant commentary on affirmative action and its impact on the black men and women who are its intended beneficiaries. As such, Carter’s book is an essential text in the public debate over racial preferences and, more broadly, the problem of race and racism in American society.

It’s a mistake, however, to regard “Reflections” as merely a critique of social policy or even a study of the workings of racism. “Generated by reason but fired by love,” as the author puts it, the book amounts to the confessions of a black intellectual who is struggling to measure his own worth in the marketplace of ideas.

Carter’s prose, always lucid if sometimes cool and aloof, is occasionally illuminated by lightning flashes of real anger and resentment. As an example of his own rare encounters with street-level racism, he recalls that he was dubbed “Brillo” by white students in his junior high school. As a law student, a black activist encouraged him to recite “the magic words, the catechism of our shared faith: ‘Yes, I am disadvantaged’ “--but Carter is quick to tell us: “I lied.”

Indeed, as we can discern for ourselves, Carter is hardly some poor benighted fellow who owes his success to an affirmative action quota. Quite the contrary, “Reflections” is an intellectual tour de force by which Carter demonstrates his scholarship, his wit and his considerable political acumen.

A single chapter on what Carter calls “The Best Black,” for example, is a startling revelation of what affirmative action really means in the life of a young black student who is grappling with his or her self-worth. As a college applicant, Carter discovered that he was not allowed to compete with white students for the full range of merit scholarships--and, as he points out, the same double-standard prevails throughout American society, where we are inclined to append the adjective “black” to doctors and lawyers, music and literature.

“We are measured by a different yardstick: first black, only black, best black ,” Carter writes. “But to professionals who have worked hard to succeed, flattery of this kind carries an unsubtle insult, for we yearn to be called what our achievements often deserve: simply the best--no qualifiers needed!’

What’s more, Carter rebels against the iron bands of political correctness that are imposed on the black intellectual. He devotes roughly a third of “Reflections” to a sustained protest against the repression of dissenting views within the black community and a spirited call for an intellectual environment that encourages “a conversation, not a monologue, and certainly not this bitter argument.

“Regrettably--but perhaps understandably--the black community is one in which dissent is often stifled,” Carter writes in a chapter that might be read as specific commentary on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. “It is unfortunate that so many critics seem to think that the price one must pay for dissent is one’s birthright: If you take the wrong position, you are thinking white; and if you think white, then you’re not really black.”

Carter calmly predicts (and even invites) the scaling-down of racial preferences: “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance,” he insists. “It does not portend disaster.” At heart, however, he seems to care less about affirmative action than about community building among black Americans:

“We should make our shared love for our people the center of our belief,” he writes, “and use that shared center as a model for the possibility of a solidarity that does not seek to impose a vision of the right way to be black.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The Second Bridegroom” by Rodney Hall (Farrar Straus & Giroux).