(FORTUNE Magazine) – Whenever groups of people take it upon themselves to make race important, the search for power is behind that. This is the real problem. White slave traders made race important -- made whites superior and blacks inferior -- to justify slavery. Today blacks find a great deal of innocence in the fact that they were subjugated and victimized, and they assume that their innocence entitles them, in turn, to pursue power in relations with whites. But as long as we preserve that racial dichotomy and don't drop the grudge against our supposed enemies, we set ourselves up for defeat. It's very understandable that the memory of our oppression creates an anger and a bitterness among blacks, a tendency to see ourselves as a separate group vying for power. It's also self-destructive. Today, although we've had great advances in civil rights and economic opportunity, blacks are further behind whites by most economic and social measures than we were in the 1950s. I believe that's because, as a group, we are locked into the notion that the way to get ahead lies in the hands of the collective rather than the individual. We are simply going to have to change. It's always dangerous to compare, but American Jews and Asians don't do that. They ask individuals to achieve by moving into the mainstream of American life. Many individual blacks also do just fine in America. That doesn't mean they don't encounter racism and discrimination. But the key to upward mobility is dropping the grudge and getting beyond the pettiness and racial anger. Douglas Wilder, who was just elected the first black governor of Virginia, did that. He was willing to say to white Virginians, Let's forgive and forget about race and look at the other issues. That made him a much more credible candidate. Jesse Jackson goes back and forth. One day he bargains, the next day he challenges. As a result, whites are very leery of him. But Wilder is the wave of the future. The handwriting is on the wall. Blacks who seek prestigious political offices will have to grant whites innocence by forgiving and forgetting. One of the tragedies of the last 20 years in American life is that races, ethnic, and gender groups have begun to seek power based solely on their race, their ethnicity, their sex. In this politics of difference, the only difference that's not credible is white maleness. I'm not against affirmative action, but I am against preferential treatment. Affirmative action's original mission was to ensure equal opportunity -- that the standards for admission to corporations, to universities, whatever, are in themselves not discriminatory and unfair. That's all it should do. Under that approach, blacks who get in the door then get credit because they deserve to be there. But when you move into preferences, you get secondary effects that stigmatize the very population you're trying to help. The stigma, which melds almost perfectly with white racism, is that if you're in a job because of an affirmative action program, then you must be less competent than the rest of us. Preferential treatment is really shaking hands with the devil.