For the Justice Department to throw its weight behind what is a largely spurious charge is nothing short of irresponsible. In a speech at Harvard earlier this week, Eleanor Holmes-Norton, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Carter, accused the Reagan Administration of "escalating the drumbeat" of reverse discrimination charges. Her attack is well grounded--the Administration has sided with whites claiming reverse discrimination in suits in Detroit, Memphis, and New Orleans in addition to the Boston and Birmingham cases.

By adding fuel to the fire reverse discrimination, the Administration threatens to reopen the painful civil rights battles of the 1960s and 1970s. Former Birmingham mayor David Vann told The New York Times that most of the city's population--Black and white--had accepted the preferential hiring plan as fair until the Justice Department reversed its position, saying "what was right is now wrong."

In addition, attacks on the plan can only work to undermine progress toward affirmative action elsewhere: caught between the dual threats of discrimination suits by whites if they do, and by women and minorities if they don't, most employers will probably seek to avoid the issue of fair hiring practices entirely.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION was not intended to be either perfect or permanent. It has evolved, through countless legal battles, is the only workable means of redressing past discrimination in a timely manner. To assert, as the Reagan Administration implicitly does, that the United States has arrived at such a harmoniously just state that continued remedial action is no longer necessary would be laughable were it not so sinister. As Norton states. "The fact is that the new equality in American life is a function of the new remedies." Take away the remedies, prematurely, and persistent racial and sexual discrimination--now, under heavy assault--will enjoy a renaissance.

The Reagan Administration's stance is malicious because it spotlights, the controversial and often imperfect faces of affirmative action without offering any constructive alternative; it tenaciously upholds rights as previously defined by the system while wholly ignoring the rights of those who have been excluded from the system entirely.

Rights-based 'criticisms of affirmative action are not new, nor are they specious. Recent years have witnessed heightened debate from those who believe society can never deviate from absolute race-and sex-blind treatment--even to reverse the effects of past discrimination.

Such legal purism may be appealing in the abstract, but it is both unrealistic and inadequate in the face of the reality of America's history of racism and sexism. And together with those whose distaste for affirmative action is less ideologically motivated, these objections indicate the limits of American commitment to full equality.

Affirmative action is seen as acceptable, even desirable, but only so long as it does not harm a single hair on a single white male head. Given the sweeping, long-term effects of past discrimination affirmative action under such strictures would be tantamount to no affirmative action at all, If our society is so shortsighted as to be unwilling to undergo limited short-term departures from absolute "equal treatment" for even so important a goal as racial and sexual equality, then social justice for all-but-the-most powerful does not stand much of a chance in this country.