Recent federal court decisions on affirmative action - some good, some bad - have paved the way for the issue to be ultimately taken up by the United States Supreme Court, possibly as early as this year.

With a twice-elected former president who supported affirmative action by saying, "Mend it, don't end it" and a newly selected president who prefers "affirmative access" over affirmative action, it is time to mobilize public opinion behind what is fundamentally a conservative remedy.

First, the good news.

In a suit brought by the Center of Individual Rights on behalf of two rejected White students, a federal judge upheld the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action program. In a 50-page written opinion issued in December, U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Duggan declared: "A racially and ethnically diverse student body produces significant educational benefits such as diversity, in the context of higher education, constitutes a compelling governmental interest."

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, also in a December ruling, upheld a University of Washington Law School affirmative action policy as constitutional. That program had also been challenged by the Center for Individual Rights, the same conservative group that had affirmative action outlawed in 1996 at the University of Texas.

Now, for the bad news.

Despite major victories in Michigan and Washington state, the battle over affirmative action is far from over.

There is still another suit to be settled challenging the University of Michigan's undergraduate affirmative action program. If that program is nullified and the law school program is left intact, the U.S. Supreme Court may step in and issue a definitive ruling.

Anti-affirmative action forces won a victory in the employment arena last year when the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld a lower court ruling that struck down the affirmative action program in Georgia's Fulton County that reserved contracts for businesses owned by women and people of color. A similar suit, filed by the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation, is pending against the city of Atlanta.

As affirmative action cases ease their way toward the Supreme Court, another war is being waged, this one for public opinion. At this point, progressive forces are losing, largely because the Far Right has been able to skillfully distort the debate.

When I was editing a book on this subject titled, "The Affirmative Action Debate" (Perseus Books), I was surprised to learn just how little even some African-Americans knew about affirmative action. This lack of knowledge has allowed opponents of affirmative action to go on the offensive and mischaracterize affirmative action as a "quota" program.

The U. S. Commission on Civil Rights provides a turgid but accurate definition of affirmative action as: "any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, which permits the consideration of race, national origin, sex, or disability, along with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities, and to prevent the recurrence of discrimination in the future."

Not only does that definition not include quotas, Executive Order 11246 specifically forbids the use of quotas in federal affirmative action programs. Therefore, the use of quotas shouldn't even be discussed within the context of affirmative action.

Unfortunately, the media has been an accomplice in this disinformation campaign by adopting the language of the Far Right. For example, there are frequent references in the media to "race-based" admissions or "gender-based" admissions to colleges. The reality is that there is not a university in the country that admits a student solely based on his or her race or gender. There are race-conscious programs and gender-sensitive programs, but not race-based or gender-based college admissions.

Among the worst canards is the allegation that these are "preference" programs. Hardly. What colleges are saying is that for decades Blacks have been excluded solely because of their race. Therefore, given that historic discrimination, there is nothing wrong with considering race as one of many factors used to evaluate qualified applicants.

The largest "preference program" does not involve affirmative action, but so-called "legacy" programs that give a preference to college applicants if their parents attended the same university. It was pointed out in my affirmative action book (p.183) that in 1994, 40 percent of the children of Harvard alumni applying to the university were admitted, compared to 14 percent of for students whose parents were not Harvard alumni.

A U.S. Department of Education study found that the alumni children admitted to Harvard had SAT scores that averaged 35 points lower than those of students with non-alumni parents.

Another study found that far more Whites have entered the gates of the 10 most elite American academic institutions through "alumni preference" than the combined numbers of all the Blacks and Latinos entering through affirmative action.

Opponents of affirmative action don't complain about alumni preference programs. They prefer instead to criticize legitimate programs that seek to expand the number of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American and female students on college campuses, in the work place or winning tax-supported government contracts.

If opponents of affirmative action are successful, we will have race-based admissions to our nation's colleges and universities, race-based government contracts and a race-based workforce. That race will be White.