BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION : Upper-Class Blacks Know Mere Money Can’t Buy Equality : THE RAGE OF A PRIVILEGED CLASS, <i> by Ellis Cose</i> ; HarperCollins, $20, 192 pages

One of the motifs in Ellis Cose’s “The Rage of a Privileged Class” is a startling fact that came to light in the middle of the riots that shook Los Angeles in 1992.

As it happens, a team of UCLA researchers was conducting a study of racial attitudes in Los Angeles when the rioting broke out. When the social scientists resumed their work after the riot, they measured a dramatic and surprising change.

“The responses of blacks with a household income of $50,000 and more were especially intriguing,” Cose writes. “Even before the riot, that group, on average, appeared to be more alienated than poorer blacks. But what stunned the researchers was that after the riot, alienation among the most affluent group of African Americans skyrocketed.”

The problem, as Cose defines it, is “the broken covenant,” a sense that privileged African Americans--the very people who have paid all the dues required for admission to American commerce, politics, media and academia--are still the victims of a racism so deep in the blood and bone that it goes unremarked.

“Many well-educated, affluent blacks have already found their way out of inner-city ghettos, yet they have not escaped America’s myriad racial demons,” Cose explains. “Consequently, they remain either estranged or in a state of emotional turmoil.”

Cose, a journalist with Newsweek, is quick to acknowledge the most common reaction to his premise: Why, after all, is he so worried about successful people who happen to be black? Isn’t the real problem of race in America to be found among the poor and the powerless? As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked to Cose: “The big problem is, ‘What are we going to do about the underclass?’ ”

But Cose insists, intriguingly and provocatively, that the successful black professional who has achieved a measure of affluence is precisely the one who is most resentful of the lingering toxin of racism.

And, Cose argues, it is both foolish and dangerous to ignore the social linkages between the underclass and the black middle class: “A nation which embitters those struggling hardest to believe in it and work within its established systems,” he writes, “is seriously undermining any effort to provide would-be hustlers and dope dealers with an attractive alternative to the streets.”

His premise comes alive in the pages of “The Rage of a Privileged Class” in a series of short profiles of black corporate executives, lawyers, scholars, journalists and public officials. The “racial demons” that these men and women confront are rarely monstrous in appearance, but they are still insulting, wearying and disheartening.

A public relations expert for Dow Chemical, for example, describes the taxing effects of “coping fatigue”--the accumulated insult to one’s self-esteem that results from “the fact that her race was not seen as an asset but as something she had to overcome.”

A Harvard law student says her professor tended to ignore the raised hands of the black students in class--and then, suddenly, he would call on several black students in a row: “As if,” she explains, “the professor had suddenly realized that he was neglecting an important segment of the student body and had resolved to make amends.”

A lawyer recalls how he was finally moved to protest the fact that his firm routinely held meetings at a restricted club where blacks were admitted only in the company of white members: “I told (a Jewish partner) that going to the club was, for me, like going to a club that idolized Hitler would be for him.”

But what really stings--and what Cose helps us to not only understand but to feel--is the fear that the bottom can drop out from under any black man or woman, no matter how accomplished or how affluent.

“As far as they are concerned,” said sociologist Lawrence Bobo about the UCLA survey that Cose describes, “what happened to Rodney King can just as easily befall any of them.”

“The Rage of a Privileged Class” is not a comforting book to read. Cose is tough-minded, sometimes angry, and always insistent on confronting us with the uglier realities of the American dream. “The racial gap,” Cose concludes, “can only be closed by recognizing it, and by recognizing why it exists.”

In that sense alone, Cose’s book is not only a wholly positive contribution to the dialogue on race in America, but it is an essential one.