"The Civil Rights Act I assure you never was passed for Asians either."

PROFESSOR of Education and Social Structure Nathan Glazer uttered these frank words yesterday. Speaking at an Asian-American Association forum, the distinguished academic criticized the extension of affirmative action guidelines to minorities other than Black Americans in general, and to Asian-Americans in particular.

"I think it was a mistake to begin with...to set up a special list" of groups qualified for affirmative action, Glazer said. "It was certainly a mistake to extend it beyond Blacks."

The professor is no naif on the subject of civil rights and racial inequity in the U.S. Author of a 1975 work, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, Glazer long has held that quotas are too blunt an instrument to apply to discrimination.

Unfortunately, his opinion suggests troubling assumptions and contradictions common in much mainstream debate over minorities in the U.S. That menace lies in insisting on seeing the minority "problem" through one lens--here applying quotas--and then setting by inference the needs of one minority against those of another.

At base, Glazer's focus on the Black experience rightly recalls more than 370 years of American history in which the brunt of racist hate and violence fell upon Black Americans. Bigotry and economic, cultural and social segregation still strike Blacks and Black communities with arguably the greatest severity of any of the American minorities; there can be no contesting that Black-white equality belongs at the top of priorities for all citizens.

But the question as framed in yesterday's forum asked panelists to find solutions to related problems faced by another minority. Namely, Glazer and another professor attempted to articulate how public policy and public opinion should address the minority status of Asian-Americans in this society.

By focusing on the question of a single federal policy--affirmative action--and strictly interpreting and defining the goals of this policy, Glazer's position effectively channeled discussion away from acknowledging the status of Asian-Americans today.

GLAZER, explaining his preferred "formal definition of `minority,'" said: "When you're a minority, you deserve special treatment."

Clearly the comment refers to actions of "policy" taken by the government: the quotas required by affirmative action. But its phrasing also casts the problems facing minorities in a narrow, even paternalistic manner. It says that U.S. society will acknowledge a minority's problems only if they require policy amounting to obvious "special treatment." Just who delivers the treatment remains tantalizingly vague.

Glazer's comments suggest that it is enough that some Asian-Americans enjoy highly visible success in the U.S. It is easy to draw from the growing numbers of Asian-American students, family businesses and professionals, as Glazer does, that "The fact is that the public concern in this country with minority problems is not with minorities that don't make problems."

That may be so. But it reveals the flaw that whoever voices "the public concern" in America risks allowing problems to fester as long as they remain covered beneath a skin of civility.

For Asian-Americans, the reality of inner-city crime, drug use and poverty is testified to by the Chinatowns, Korea-towns, and Vietnamese and Cambodian neighborhoods that lie in the heart of some of America's largest cities. The lives of Asian immigrants are scarred by the same kinds of racism that have welcomed all "ethnics" to this country.

For the vast numbers of Asian-Americans who do not come to America with strong college educations and for their descendents, the miracle of "success" comes with familiar, brutal infrequency. And finally, this way of thinking ignores whatever cultural legacies remain unique to Asian-Americans--what some have labelled orthodoxy, passivity or "oriental" foreignness--and what they provoke from mainstream America.

It is easy to attempt a simple answer to problems of race and ethnicity in America. It is dangerous when one limits the application of rights, consciously or no, in definitions too narrow for the reality.