A November 7 ballot proposal in Michigan drew passionate attacks from the Democratic Party, Big Business, unions, universities, the major newspapers, and religious, civic, and civil-rights groups. It drew tepid opposition even from the state’s top Republicans.

Among the attacks:

•"The proposal could have remarkably negative effects on … breast cancer screenings [and] domestic-violence shelters for women," editorialized The Detroit News.

•"It will immediately eliminate opportunities for women and minorities to have equal access to jobs, education, and contracts in Michigan," said a flier highlighted on the Web site of One United Michigan, the major establishment opposition group.

•It would "give [the state’s] universities, its local governments, its counties, and its state bodies the right to discriminate against blacks, Latinos, and women in violation of our federally guaranteed equal-rights protections," said By Any Means Necessary, the shorthand name of a more radical opposition group.

What is this horrible monstrosity? And why did Michigan’s voters adopt it by 58 percent to 42 percent after a campaign in which opponents outspent supporters by 4-to-1?

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, as supporters call it, amends the state constitution by outlawing racial discrimination against Asians and whites — as well as against blacks and Hispanics — in certain public programs. This is what Congress thought it had done in the 1964 Civil Rights Act before the courts went to work on it.

Most — if not all — of the nation’s leading law firms seek to become more diverse by using "very large hiring preferences" for African-Americans and smaller preferences for Hispanics. So most of their newly hired minority lawyers have relatively weak academic records that would have brought rejection had they been white.

But these preferences are at best a mixed blessing — and are often a curse — for their recipients. After a year or two on the job, most minority associates at big firms get less desirable assignments and less training than their white counterparts. Many become discouraged and embittered. Young black lawyers leave big firms "at two or three times the rate of whites."

These problems plague minority lawyers precisely because of the racial preferences that got most of them hired. By lowering the big firms’ usual hiring standards, large preferences bring "disparities in expectations and performance that ultimately hurt the intended beneficiaries."

These are among the conclusions copiously documented by Richard Sander, a UCLA law professor, in a 66-page article soon to be published in the North Carolina Law Review. It is laden with meticulous statistical analyses of six publicly available data sets, including surveys of thousands of law students and lawyers at various stages in their lives and careers.

Sander’s blockbuster article, "The Racial Paradox of the Corporate Law Firm," rejects the conventional wisdom that racism explains why most young black lawyers in large firms do not fare well, and why barely 1 percent of big-firm partners — compared with 8 percent of new hires — are black.

When conservative Republicans such as House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist jointly sponsor Voting Rights Act amendments with such liberal Democrats as Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Edward Kennedy, be suspicious.

They are steamrollering through Congress bipartisan legislation to renew for the next 25 years a much-misunderstood, largely anachronistic provision (Section 5) of the Voting Rights Act, including amendments that are driven by racial-identity politics and that would aggravate ideological polarization.

The amendments would turn back the clock on racial progress by requiring even more racial gerrymandering of election districts than under current law. And the extension of Section 5, as currently drafted, would perpetuate an extraordinarily punitive oversight regime that gives to federal political appointees and not-exactly-apolitical bureaucrats at the Justice Department unreviewable power to dictate state and local election rules in nine (mostly Southern) states and some other jurisdictions.

Why would broad bipartisan majorities of House and Senate incumbents want to do that? To help themselves win re-election, for starters. More specifically, Democrats are pandering to the demands of black and Hispanic politicians for safe seats and to the ideological obsessions of the civil-rights lobby, which still sees America as so steeped in racism that whites just won’t vote for minority candidates.

Never mind that Douglas Wilder, an African-American, was elected governor of Virginia in 1989; Bill Richardson, a Hispanic, was elected governor of New Mexico in 2002; Colin Powell might well have been elected president of the United States had he run in 1996; nine of the 34 Georgia officials elected statewide are black; and so on, and so on.

The 35-year-old debate about affirmative action in university admissions has often focused on whether the supposed benefits to black and Hispanic students justify the costs to whites and Asians who lose out, and the resulting racial divisions and resentments.