Race in America : COLOR-BLIND: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World.<i> By Ellis Cose</i> .<i> HarperCollins: 260 pp., $24</i>

Coming in the wake of alarmist books warning of a coming race war in the United States, Ellis Cose’s “Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World” is notable for its reasonable tone, its research and most of all for daring to look beyond the headlines to set a framework for a future of better race relations.

Despite the title of his book, Cose concludes that the future of race relations will not be dominated by colorblindness, an ideal frequently mentioned by conservatives and moderates as a rational policy on race for both private industry and government.

Colorblindness has not worked in any society, Cose argues. Brazil and other South American countries that claim to be colorblind are in fact cultures with strong color-consciousness, Cose reports. Those countries ignore the reality of class divisions that generally put darker-skinned people on the lowest rungs of society.

Surprisingly, Cose, a contributing editor at Newsweek, looks to South Africa as a better model for the future of American race relations. He admires South Africans for openly discussing their racism in the aftermath of political upheavals and the nation’s first multiracial democratic elections. South Africa’s discussions about race and wealth, race and culture and even the past crimes committed by one race against the other are seen by Cose as productive steps in rebuilding a nation with a healthy, honest awareness of racism and its power to damage a society.

Using the South African model, Cose would have Americans engage in intense dialogue about race using a 12-step agenda that begins with the admonition that simply hoping that time will heal modern America’s racial wounds is a reckless fantasy.

Key to Cose’s agenda is the idea that “nice people,” Americans who don’t hate anyone and rarely speak out on racial issues, are as responsible for the difficult state of American race relations as the loudest hatemonger. As a condition for getting productive discussions started on race, Cose says the U.S. needs to address disproportionate poverty and segregation among blacks and Latinos. And the “nice people” have to open their mouths and express themselves. They have to develop a taste for discussing race relations.

Once the serious discussions about race are underway, Cose wants Americans to look at a future based on the concept of being “race-neutral” instead of colorblind. He ultimately concludes that Americans are far too aware of black skin, brown skin, white skin and any other skin color to ever be blind to race. Instead, Cose proposes that Americans can aspire to be race-neutral--working together to ensure that racism does not poison the society.

Race-neutrality is a goal that “we cannot afford to abandon--not if we believe that America can achieve its potential, not if we wish to keep alive faith in the triumph of good ideas over bad.” Cose sets the idea of a race-neutral society as the natural outgrowth of the nation’s treasured ideals of “liberty, justice and equality” and says that if the nation is to be true to itself, Americans have no choice but to try to neutralize racial differences.

At the heart of the discussion Cose wants to start are two questions: What would it take for America to be truly race-neutral? And how does America go about turning itself into a race-neutral society?

As a model for such a discussion, Cose describes the program being proposed by University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Lani Guinier, who became nationally known after her ideas on racially weighted elections caused President Clinton to withdraw her nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights. Guinier, the child of a black-white couple, has planned the Commonplace project, which is intended to get blacks and whites in the Philadelphia area into serious discussions about race relations there.

Guinier envisions having participants in her group do more than talk. She intends to have them try to solve civic problems and work on projects together, with the hope that blacks and whites will get to know each other and build a new, genuinely multiracial sense of community. Cose endorses this “bottom-up approach to public conversation.” He hopes Guinier’s project, which has attracted funding from a major foundation, will be “an archetype for [the] new national conversation.”

Cose wants to add a sense of urgency about racial issues to Guinier’s model. His desire for urgency is why he is a fan of the South African approach to dealing with race. South Africans of all colors realize that the future of their country is at stake, Cose writes, and that regardless of color they share a “common destiny.” Cose fears that Americans in the late 20th century don’t have such a sense of urgency across racial lines, and he argues that Americans too often don’t appreciate that blacks, Asians, Latinos, whites and other Americans truly do have a common destiny.

Ironically, Cose’s intriguing struggle with ideas and plans for the future of American race relations does not come into focus until the very end of his book. More than three-quarters of the book is taken up with a review of continuing battles in American society over racial issues ranging from affirmative action to trying to educate minority children and arguments over the intellectual capacity of black people.

Cose goes to especially great lengths in dissecting “The Bell Curve,” the controversial book that put forth data on poor performances by blacks on standardized tests and sparked arguments about whether one race could be judged to be less intellectually capable than another. Cose details the history of how racial classification of human beings was started by an 18th century geneticist and offers a survey of recent polls and books on race.

Cose throws into this mix quirky anecdotes about odd racial situations, such as his story about a woman who believed she was white but discovered that her great-grandfather was black. He also tells a fascinating story about a very light-skinned black woman who appears to be white. When whites make racist jokes or comments in her presence, the woman has taken to handing out written cards revealing that she is black and informing whites that she does not appreciate jokes about blacks. Cose also spends pages on the voluntary racial segregation among black and white college students as well as the problems facing black executives in corporate America.

Cose takes the reader on a helter-skelter ride through these stories, arguments over racial issues and interviews with people caught up in racial dramas. There does not seem to be a center to three-quarters of the book. But his honesty and curiosity about people bail him out.

His journey makes for good reading. He is an open, sincere observer of the American scene and, unlike some, he is not quick to condemn all whites for the nation’s racial problems. In fact, Cose writes that Americans as a whole are “no longer a racist people.” Similarly, while he basically supports affirmative action, Cose concedes it is a “bad system.”

The best of Cose’s tour of theories and controversies on the American racial scene have to do with his experiences as a journalist. He tells a poignant story about an Esquire editor who would not consider hiring him to write for the magazine because the editor said blacks did not read Esquire. He recounts phone calls from corporate headhunters who interview him only so they can claim to have considered a black for a job while they have already decided to hire a white candidate with inside connections.

Overall, this book is a good primer for anyone who wants to see what has been going on with race relations through the eyes of a journalist who keeps a microscope on the subject. But the real contribution “Color Blind” makes to the ongoing debate about race is when Cose starts to talk about the future. He argues for Americans of all colors to enter into serious discussion about race relations with the understanding that such talk is critical to a healthy America.

That idea alone is worth the price of admission to Cose’s book.