LENOX, Mass.-- My family roots run deep in the South, like the Mississippi, Yadkin and Yellow rivers along which we've toiled. I am among the first generation of black Shipps not born on a hardscrabble farm or hired out to pick cotton at harvest time. I'm among the third generation of Shipps born in Georgia after slavery was legally abolished and the last to have lived through America's apartheid. With the exception of a couple of years in the projects, we lived in raggedy houses without indoor plumbing but often with rats that frightened even my father.

Being the oldest of six kids, I learned responsibility early: toting buckets of water into the house a couple of times a day for cooking, cleaning and, especially on Saturdays, bathing; then toting a different kind of bucket out every morning to dump into the outhouse.

But here I sit today, at an ashram on the banks of Lake Mahkeenac in the Berkshires, getting in touch with myself for a few days at this yoga center.

I'm a graduate of an Ivy League institution Columbia University and I also teach there. I've written for two of the largest newspapers in the county. I travel. I live life in the city to the fullest. I do all right.

If I were anybody else, many people let me be clear here, many white people would say that I've realized the American Dream. I've made something of myself, they might say. But, no. Because I am black, they will always say that I am where I am solely because of affirmative action. That I am filling some quota. That I am not worthy of whatever job I hold. That they and their father and their brothers and their cousins are better.

It infuriates me that the least among white folks thinks himself superior to me. So conservative Republicans leading the charge to dismantle this nation's commitment to equal opportunity for all people strike a nerve when they question affirmative action in the 1990s.

People like me also see a downside to a policy whose raison d'etre is that blacks are damaged goods and need special help. Few people like me will ever say this publicly because we are not allies of those out to do in affirmative action while trading on insecurities of white Americans. Many of them dyed-in-the-wool racists who have always sought to keep blacks "in their place" do not come into this debate with clean hands.

But, for a moment, let's forget them and what's in their hands or hearts. Affirmative action as a permanent feature of the landscape is an abomination. Talented young blacks an entire generation of them have grown up thinking of themselves as "minorities" whose only entree into schools or the work place is through some special program.

I refuse to seek anything marked "minority set-aside." I have three nephews, ages 10, 5 and 3 months. When it's time for them to get into prep schools or college or corporate America, if they walk through the side door marked "Affirmative Action Only," I'm disowning them.

Having said this, however, I won't go so far as to say, Do away with affirmative action as a guiding principle. That's because I, like most other blacks, don't trust white men who talk about a color-blind society. We know, as Roger Wilkins writes in the current issue of The Nation: "Without the requirements calling for plans, good-faith efforts and the setting of broad numerical goals, many institutions would do what they had always done: Assert that they 'couldn't find anyone qualified,' and then go out and hire the white man they wanted to hire in the first place."

Let's be honest. Affirmative action programs need to be reviewed and refined. But not eliminated. Not yet.

As a federal judge recently ruled in Texas: "Until society sufficiently overcomes the effects of pervasive racism, affirmative action is necessary."