Tails, you’re racist.  That seems to be the basic indictment of us white guys espoused by virtuous black people like Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, Carl Rowan, and Willie Brown.

The same indictment is also parroted by a lot of virtuous white guys (and women), some of whom apparently feel that their best shot at avoiding the suspicion of racism in themselves is a hair-trigger readiness to impute racism to others.

Among the recent developments that bring these thoughts to mind are the furor over the famous Texaco tapes, the publication of Rowan’s new book, the success of black congressional candidates in majority-white districts this year, and the California referendum barring racial preference.

Shelby Steele, a leading black critic of preferences, suggested a useful framework for making sense of these developments before most of them had occurred.

"Whites on the left tend to recompose their vulnerability to the stereotype of whites as racists into an exaggerated deference toward minorities," Steele wrote in the Oct. 7 New Republic. "Preferences give liberal whites the chance to show deference to black victimization, and they give the black leadership the chance to keep asserting that racism is the main problem that blacks face."

Consider the tale of the Texaco tapes. They were surreptitiously recorded at an August 1994 meeting in which top executives discussed a discrimination suit by nonwhite employees. The executives spoke at length about destroying relevant documents. What magnified this from an important story about possible obstruction of justice into a national sensation was a Nov. 4 report by The New York Times. It said that top Texaco executives had been caught on tape "belittling the company’s minority employees with racial epithets," including "nigger," and with phrases like "black jelly beans."

"The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."

So says the key provision of the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI)-otherwise known as Proposition 209-which will go before the state’s voters on Nov. 5. It will be the first up-or-down popular vote ever on racial preferences.

There are good reasons to vote no:

• The CCRI would mean a dramatic drop in admissions of black and Hispanic students to the University of California’s elite campuses, which serve as gate-ways to opportunity in a society still plagued by racial inequality.

• It would ban not only preferential selection processes but also racially targeted recruitment and outreach programs that seek to increase the minority applicant pool.

• It could make it more difficult to offset the potent but hard-to-prove brand of discrimination against black and Hispanic candidates that may still prevail in many police and fire departments and other government workplaces.

• Such a cold-turkey withdrawal from the current system could have a dispiriting effect on many black and Hispanic people who have come to believe-sincerely, if erroneously-that racial preferences are the only way they can get a fair shake.

• Many CCRI supporters preach a colorblind absolutism that may impede wise public policy, and that is required neither by the Constitution nor by principles of fairness and morality-not, at least, in comparison with such established practices as preferential admissions of affluent alumni children.

But for all that, I would vote yes.

At first blush, it seemed an abdication of responsibility when the Supreme Court declined to review the 5th Circuit’s sweeping decision barring all consideration of race in admissions at the University of Texas School of Law.

The July I denial of certiorari in Texas u Hopwood sowed confusion-probably into the next millennium-as to the legality of racial preferences in admissions everywhere. It left institutions in different states subject to disparate interpretations of the Constitution.

State universities in most of the country will presumably feel free to continue using racial preferences, reasoning that the Court’s 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke remains the law of the land.

But those in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi are subject to the 5th Circuit’s broad directives in Hopwood that Bakke is no longer good law, that universities may not consider race, and that any who do so risk punitive damage awards to rejected white applicants.

(While the 5th Circuit did say that preferences could theoretically be used to remedy an institution’s recent history of proven discrimination against minorities, no university appears to have such a recent history.)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s one-page explanation for her vote to deny certiorari, joined by Justice David Souter, was less than convincing.

Ginsburg noted that Texas no longer defended the crude, quota-like admissions process that the law school had used in 1992 (when the case was filed), and that the record shed little light on the operation of the school’s current regime of racial preferences.

"When I went to Yale Law School, they had reduced black admissions from 40 to 12. We were all there on our own merit. In subsequent years, that’s a fact that’s been clouded."

So said Justice Clarence Thomas in a May 7 speech at Texas Wesleyan University Law School, according to The Dallas Morning News. He also said that be takes offense when people say he’s a product of affirmative action, and that such policies did not exist when he attended a private Catholic school, college, and Yale Law School.

With all respect for Justice Thomas’ remarkable rise from adversity, these assertions are at odds with the historical record at Yale Law School, which used explicitly race-based preferences for blacks at the time of Thomas’ admission in 1971.

Another Thomas quotation, from his concurrence in Adarand Constructors Inc v. Peña (1995): "I believe that there is a ‘moral [and] constitutional equivalence’… between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in older to foster some current notion of equality."

With all due regard for the sincerity of Thomas’ passionate opposition to race-based affirmative action, it borders on fanaticism to suggest that such preferences are just as bad as was the longstanding oppression of blacks through the apartheid regime of official segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The two statements quoted above exemplify what is (to me) most troubling about Justice Thomas: While his judicial opinions often contribute a valuable perspective on hard issues, and while he does a great service by preaching the values of self-reliance and hard work to students and others around the country, he often exudes the concede-nothing, bellicose absolutism of a seething ideological zealot.

Guess who said this:

It is simply wrong to give one applicant an automatic advantage over another applicant, based solely upon the color of one’s skin. It was wrong 50 years ago, and it is wrong today…. Admissions decisions should not be based upon race or ethnicity. Such decisions should be based upon individual merit, individual qualifications and individual preparedness.

If you picked Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas or Bob Dole or some other anti-affirmative action advocate of the Constitution-is-colorblind school, go to the back of the class.

No, the quote is from the second paragraph of an April 29 press release put out by Texas Attorney General Dan Morales, announcing his petition for Supreme Court review in Texas v. Hopwood. That’s the big affirmative action case-perhaps the biggest ever-in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit barred consideration of race in admissions at the University of Texas Law School.

The central thrust of Morales’ petition for certiorari is that the state should be allowed to continue using preferences (although not "quotas"), based upon race or ethnicity, to admit black and Hispanic applicants ahead of whites with far better grades, test scores, and other nonracial qualifications.

The petition, prepared for Morales by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, contains powerful constitutional arguments that may ultimately be persuasive. But the result it seeks is virtually the opposite of that suggested by the press release.

The press release slyly slips some of the cat out of the bag in its fifth paragraph, which says that "race should be allowed to be considered as only one of a multitude of personal factors." But the dominant message is (in the words of the first paragraph) that "race-based policies must be eliminated."