INTERVIEWER: One of the counter-arguments to that is that there was essentially a group of black folks who were already middle class during the '60s, the educated black middle class, who probably would have made it anyway, once the barriers were lifted, and that in some ways they might have been the ones who benefited most from affirmative action because they're already there and ready to jump through the gate and the ones who were either working class or under-class folks who didn't really get that access because we were the ones that were most acceptable. So we got in the door first and now the door's closed and there's no room for anybody else to get in.

EDLEY: Here's the way I think about affirmative action. It does two things. First, it opens the door. Second, if it's aggressive affirmative action you kind of reach just outside the door and grab somebody and bring them in. But for people who aren't prepared to walk through that door affirmative action isn't going to help. It only stands to reason that the first beneficiaries of affirmative action would be those who were middle class or who otherwise were most prepared to walk through the door and take advantage of the opportunities, but getting the door open is harder than many Americans admit.

INTERVIEWER: So how do we reach back and get those who are just on the other side of the door?

EDLEY: Reaching beyond that door to get folks who aren't ready is not something that affirmative action alone can do. That's what the rest of the opportunity agenda is for. That's why we need school reform, that's why we need job training, that's why we need stronger families, that's why we need safe communities. It's only by putting the entire package together, including opening the door of opportunity, that we'll make real progress.

INTERVIEWER: Do you as a child of that black middle class feel a special obligation to reach back?

EDLEY: As a child of the middle class I feel a special obligation. Moreover, I hear the stigma argument all the time. But affirmative action causes stigma. Well, yes, affirmative action causes stigma. That's one of the costs of affirmative action, I acknowledge it. It's a cost worth paying. For my generation to bear a little stigma it would be hubris to complain about it. I haven't had to get beaten over the head, I haven't had to get arrested, who am I to complain about a little bit of stigma? I welcome the opportunity to overcome that stigma and demonstrate that I'm making a contribution.

INTERVIEWER: One of the criticisms of affirmative action is that it's going to permanently etch race consciousness into the society....

EDLEY: We have race consciousness. It is alive, it is in many places virulent. The question is what to do about it and I'm not in favor of ignoring it. I'm in favor of taking concrete effective steps to try to ameliorate it. One way we do that, I think, is by creating institutions, creating situations in which people who are different can come together and achieve together and affirmative action is about that. When will affirmative action end? For me I go back to the question of what are its purposes? If its purpose is to remedy discrimination and to bring about inclusion in institutions where inclusion is critically necessary then affirmative action should end when those purposes no longer have force. When discrimination ends, when race is of no more social and economic significance than whether you're a Protestant or a Presbyterian, then there will be no need for affirmative action and it should go away.

INTERVIEWER: How will you know when that day comes?

EDLEY: Right now whether someone is an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian matters for about an hour and a half on Sunday and maybe it matters Sunday night for dinner, but on Monday morning when you go to your work place it doesn't matter. America has only recently in our history come to that point with respect to religious tolerance. I think that someday we will get there with respect to race. It doesn't mean assimilation in the sense that there's no difference between Presbyterians and Episcopalians, it simply means that we accept our differences, enjoy those differences, celebrate them, rather than using them as a way to separate ourselves so that our communities are at each other's throats. It takes a certain amount of faith, whether you call it civic faith or religious faith, to believe that human nature will lead us to that goal, but you've got to be an optimist in this business.

INTERVIEWER: I want to come back to this class thing again because I'm a biracial child and I have a half-brother actually who's white he's my half-brother and he teaches at a university and during the thick of this affirmative action thing back in the '70s I guess it was, he was having a hell of a time finding a job. We actually had very interesting dinner conversations about -- everybody was looking for, preferably a black female to fill those slots in college and he was having a hard time as a white male trying to get a job. And one of the arguments he was making was that it seems like the policy would have met much less opposition, particularly from those white males who feel like they're the disadvantaged class now if it had been a class based remedy from the beginning instead of a race based...

EDLEY: Look, if I go to rent the apartment or apply for a loan class matters, race matters too. So measures that simply address the class issue are simply going to be incomplete. They are not going to deal effectively with the problem of discrimination. Now with regard to diversity, again class matters but race matters too, that the race is a source of strength. I mean take the police department example. Class helps. It helps to have people who perhaps have grown up poor and therefore will feel some more affinity, will have more of an understanding of what's at stake in poor communities that they are trying to police, but color still matters in America and in that respect the effectiveness of the police department will depend, at least in part, on the racial diversity of it. Now again, it's not all black and white. Context matters a lot and the nuances matter a lot. I think it is wrong to say that in all circumstances diversity is a compelling justification, just as it is wrong to say that diversity is never a compelling justification. The issue is to have a conversation in which we can identify those places, those institutions, in which it matters enough to justify using affirmative action. I want to have that conversation.

One of the myths here is that affirmative action has been so overwhelmingly successful that white males can't get a job anymore. Look, if you look around universities you will see very few minorities who are on the faculty so it simply can't be the case that all of these frustrated white males who have wanted academic appointments and had trouble getting them failed to get them because minorities were taking over higher education. It ain't true. Look at the facts. Another problem with this of course is that if you have nine white guys and a woman trying to get a promotion and the woman gets it the nine white guys may all say oh, well, it was affirmative action, but for affirmative action I would have had that promotion and indeed, the manager may tell them I needed a woman instead of telling them you weren't good enough. You know that those nine white guys, at least eight of them are wrong, and maybe all nine of them are wrong.

INTERVIEWER: You said you don't see affirmative action as an outgrowth --

EDLEY: No, I do. I do. Absolutely. I think first and foremost affirmative action is a way of making the anti-discrimination -- first and foremost affirmative action is a way of making the commitment to non-discrimination effective because it helps root out illegal practices that may be too subtle to detect but it also just helps us lean against an almost natural birds of a feather tendency to prefer people who are like ourselves even when that's not justified. I remember at one point in the conversations with the President we were preparing him for a press conference and somebody asked Mr. President, what's your view on affirmative action? He was practicing. And he launched into this long discussion about how much discrimination there is in America and all the evidence that we talked with him about continuing discrimination and he said that's why we need affirmative action because we still need an effective way to root out that discrimination. Everybody thought that was a great answer but I stopped him and I said look, I'm not so sure. The problem is that the public does not believe the social science evidence, they don't know it about how much discrimination still exists. They're going to listen to you and think you're on another planet. So while I believe that the President needs to teach the nation over time about the continuing importance of discrimination there's a subtler thing at work. The audience might not believe that they engage in discrimination but they probably will acknowledge the simple human tendency to hang out with people who are like them, whether it's because they have the same religion or the same class or the same color. They know that when it comes time to make a decision about who to invite to a party or who to hire or who to give a contract to, you look for somebody with whom you feel some connection. Now if race prevents that sense of connection and you put all of those preferences together the result across society as a whole is the denial of opportunity. Affirmative action is something that lets us hold those preferences in check and say look, I'm going to look beyond my simple preference and try to reach out to somebody who's not like me.

INTERVIEWER: Do you see affirmative action as a black issue?

EDLEY: Numerically, the greatest number of beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women. That's not only because there are more white women, it's because white women have, because of class reasons, more likely been in a position to walk through the door of opportunity, take advantage of the opportunity once the door has been open. White women have been the principle beneficiaries of affirmative action. It is not only a black issue. The political spin that opponents put on it is to try to make it a black issue because they recognize that works for them as a wedge issue. On the other hand those of us who support affirmative action constantly try to remind people, Hey, this is about women, also. And increasingly, women recognize that.

INTERVIEWER: One of the thing when I was just starting my reporting career in the '70s, one of the huge debates was--Okay, so we're going to have black folks were supposed to be the original beneficiaries, but then included white women, then they included Asian Americans, then the included Native Americans. How many classes of people can we....

EDLEY: Go back to first principles. Why have affirmative action? If your answer is we need it to remedy discrimination and we need it in order to gain strength through inclusion, then which groups ought to be beneficiaries? Well, the answer is, Who is a victim of discrimination? Of a kind of a persistent enduring sort. And, who's been excluded in a way that cripples us economically, socially. That kind of logic leads you quickly to conclude well women have been and still are important victims of discrimination in lots of sectors and lots of places of the economy. Native Americans, Latinos certainly. Asians, in many communities still. If you think that the basis for affirmative action is reparations for slavery, then there's other groups don't necessarily fit in. But again, I don't think that the moral claim for reparations is very strong.

INTERVIEWER: One of the classes that I took here at Harvard, was one of my favorite courses, was a course I took with Daniel Moynihan who had just, was then in retreat from Washington, and had written this book on the politics of the guaranteed income. And, one of the things that he talked about was if you're going to have a policy that's aimed at doing some rather nebulous thing in America, you really need to figure out a way to explain it simply to people. And, it's occurred to me as I've looked at this affirmative action and even going through the pages of your book, it's just one of the problems with affirmative action is that you can't explain it simply.

EDLEY: Well, that's exactly right. The complexity of this issue is one of the things that was a great concern, as we were doing the White House review, because as we struggled with the moral issues, as we struggled with the social science, there was this haunting concern of how are we going to explain this to the American people? It's not a bumper sticker kind of an issue, and in that respect it may be one of those issues that politics is particularly poor at handling effectively. Because politics is about I'm right and you're wrong. This issue isn't like that.

This issue is about complicated differences and values and we're trying to search for a way to bridge those differences. This issue is about reconnecting communities, and I'm right, you're wrong is not a prescription for connecting communities.

I also think that politicians who over-simplify do us a disservice. If a politician stands up and says I'm for vigorous enforcement of the discrimination laws and I'm for equal opportunity, and I'm against quotas, I don't know for any politician who wouldn't say exactly those same words. David Duke would say exactly those words.

INTERVIEWER: So, who couldn't?

EDLEY: Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Any politician would say exactly those words. It doesn't help the discussion, it doesn't help the debate. It hides the issues rather than helping us bridge our differences. This is one of those issues where we need to demand that our leaders speak truth about race. Simple slogans fail the test.

INTERVIEWER: So, what happens to "mend it, don't end it."

EDLEY: "Mend it, don't end it" is a prescription. "Mend it, don't end it" says, "Mend it, don't end it" is the summary line of a long speech and a long report that doesn't communicate all the values. It simply communicates the bottom line position. What concerns me is people who think that saying I want to enforce the anti-discrimination laws, that constitutes an effective response to anything, because it doesn't.