PERSPECTIVE ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION : White Elites and Willy Loman : It’s ironic: The formulas that hurt white male workers are imposed by white male bosses with nothing to risk.

In early April, some 600 professional papers will be presented at the Pacific Sociological Assn. meetings in San Francisco. Though affirmative action is the hottest sociological topic in the state and nation, not a single paper title directly mentions the issue. This is nearly always the case. Incredibly, sociologists have written few papers and fewer books on affirmative action. Political correctness dictates that the policies are to be applauded, not studied.

Silence has obscured how class and age differences among white men unequally structured benefits and costs of the nation’s largest semisecret social-engineering program. White males are not all alike. We must get beyond taboos and the stereotypical black/white or male/female arguments. There are elite and very ordinary white males.

Older white elites now openly defend forceful redistribution of educational and occupational opportunities by race and gender as preserving social order. UCLA Chancellor Charles Young recently rationalized affirmative action as riot control: “I can tell you that if we hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t be an occasional uprising in South-Central Los Angeles or mid-town Detroit. We’d be in a battleground.” Therefore, affirmative action is “for all of us.” Is it?

Government bureaucrats and judges may have constructed the goals-and-timetables formulas that permeate corporate and government personnel procedures. But the “voluntary” affirmative-action plans that spread throughout most of corporate and public-sector America would not have settled in so smoothly without top-down enthusiasm or accommodation. To stay out of court and cultivate public relations, white males in the board room were quite willing to sell out due process and equal-protection rights of white men on the assembly line and in the office. It’s an old story.

When radicals thunder about “white-male domination” we need to ask: “Which white males? Harvard grads or high school dropouts?”

White-male elites feel freer than ever to scorn other white males who don’t “make it.” Elite bias explains why, during 12 years of Republican White House rule, only a handful of top aides even recognized, much less tried to explore, how reverse discrimination might unjustly injure middle- and working-class whites. At the conservative Heritage Foundation, “white male firefighter” became a pejorative jeer against affirmative-action protest; legitimate protest was confused with “whining”--a staple on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show; and it is all but forgotten that Ronald Reagan fired 10,000 striking air traffic controllers--nearly all veterans and white males--without shedding a tear. This is white-male solidarity?

Before PC, liberal academics and journalists were quick to probe class differences; lately, however, 100 years of labor-management confrontation seem to have disappeared along with recognition that largely white-male unions won the 40-hour work week and health benefits. Indeed, even memory of “Norma Rae” has faded--as has the lonely specter of Willy Loman, the tragic protagonist in Arthur Miller’s magnificent “Death of a Salesman.” Perhaps the century’s prototypical, struggling white male, Willy Loman “never earned a lot of money, his name was never in the paper and wasn’t the finest character who ever lived.” But he worked like a dog for his family to be “thrown on the ashcan” because he got old--whereupon he committed suicide so his family could harvest his insurance.

Today, mention of the doomed Willy Loman is dissonant with politically correct dogma on “white-male privilege.” Instead, his grandchildren must listen to “passionate defenses” of ethnic-gender preferences by Chancellor Young and other tenured white males who assure younger brethren that their sacrifices under affirmative action are for “all of us.” (This has a hollow ring at sociology conventions where there are relatively few white-male faculty under age 50. A generation has largely disappeared.)

Elite attempts to quash “angry white males” will inhibit much-needed free debate. Several reporters have recently asked me to refer them to reverse discrimination victims I interviewed some years ago. I originally promised the subjects confidentiality, but I phoned a few to see if they now wished to “go public” and talk to reporters. Most refused. They were less fearful of being thought racist or “whiners”--and they now feel their accounts will be believed. But what they still feared most was career-killing trouble from white-male supervisors who are--and always have been--the primary enforcers of affirmative action.