THE LAST PLANTATION: A Memoir of Race, Conflict, and Healing.<i> By Itabari Njeri</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 308 pp., $24</i>

In a time when Tiger Woods is making our conception of skin tone identity show off the simplistic holes in its drawers, no more perfect book could arrive than Itabari Njeri’s “The Last Plantation,” which is subtitled “A Memoir of Race, Conflict, and Healing.”

Njeri’s effort, at its best, achieves a freshness because of some basic truths about our dialogue over what makes us who we actually are. Through interviews, renderings of political gatherings, examinations of race hustlers who exploit the troubles of their people for personal ends and assessments of how our culture’s texture is redefined by the expanding variety of ethnic groups, Njeri makes firm her observation that our problems aren’t as simple as black and white.

We are accustomed to the fact that the meanings of race and class--as they influence the tenor of conflicting mores, political opposition, codes of xenophobia and the invisible facts of psychological experience and as they inspire evolving resentments and function in common with environment--are usually screwed up by American writers because the nature of our antagonisms and our allegiances is so vast. Or, we find both in the worlds of intellectuals and of the populace an almost addictive preference for either the glib or the holier-than-thou pretense of having heard it all and thought it all through for so long that the whole subject is now no more than a suppurating bore. In short, since everything went wrong and continues to do so, what’s new?

Going her own way, Njeri brings intellectual sobriety, wit and pathos to the intricacies of her subject, creating a layered combination of memoir, first-class investigative reporting and social meditation. The narrative moves forward and backward in time, shifting place for contrast, thematic design and counterpoint. This architecture helps make the book an atypical look at the colored folks under the microscope. Shrewdly chosen details let Njeri’s readers gauge the hostility that both precedes and follows overt racial confrontation. Protean, the enmity reverberates from the citizen on the street to the household to the corner store to the administration of a sprawling city.

But Njeri loses steam whenever she repeats cliches about historical oppression or about the supposed psychological devastation suffered by Negroes because of racism or puts too much trust in “solutions” from the worlds of mental therapy and “healing.” It is also true that by recording her sexual memories and fantasies, as well as her visits to the gynecologist, Njeri personalizes her time. The writer is one woman whose conception of feminist freedom leads them to the same mistake made by too many men--assuming that soiled laundry (however happily its owners went about giving it stink and stain) means the same thing to a reader that it does to a bloodhound in pursuit of a body, moving or dead. The shortcomings, however, are far less important than the overall effect; Njeri provides a complicated sense of internal and external crises and a brave and perceptive grasp of our social moment.

As a former reporter for The Los Angeles Times, Njeri developed an understanding of our convoluted ethnic troubles and the individuated mores and manners of various groups. Njeri was at The Times during the two judicial preludes to the riot that began on April 29, 1992, and determined through interviews and conversations that each contributed equally to the explosive mood that set Los Angeles afire. The Simi Valley acquittal of the cops who whipped Rodney King after he took them on a 90-mph chase got national attention, while the suspended sentence given Soon Ja Du, the Korean storekeeper who killed a teenage and combative Negro, Latasha Harlins, didn’t. We have all seen the tape of King taking the lumps that made him a millionaire victim of the city, but we are not at all familiar with the store’s tape that shows Harlins storming off and falling so quickly after being hit in the back by the bullet.

Then there was the riot itself and the bitter, but far from simple, aftermath. The rage that gave thrust and shape to the burning and the looting remained in the air and was absorbed by a good many people. That feeling transformed itself from one place to the next, neither the top nor the middle nor the bottom agreeing upon the nature of the ethnic struggle or its leadership. Immigration and miscegenation have created new oppositions. The assumption that black people have some sort of moral high ground and superior tactical expertise due to historical injustice expertise does not pertain.

Everything is much more tangled up. The amorphous worm bucket of “blackness” that came with ‘60s Negro nationalism no longer holds everyone in place, which is just as true of the “Third World united front” that appeared in the same period. Now, newly arrived Asian immigrants and Negroes are at odds. There are also those calling for the creation of a new category for those people who, once upon a time, automatically defined themselves as “black” no matter how light their skin or blue or green their eyes. At the behest of their parents or on their own, such people don’t feel their bloodlines make it possible to settle for a definition that recognizes only their African heritage. They want the wholeness of their family story related in the proverbial mix, which means we must accept an American story that we have ducked in order to keep racial categories free of the realities that account for the astounding range of the national physiognomy.

That is why Njeri prefers grouping people by ethnicity rather than race, which is, after all, a term scoffed at by the scientific disciplines. Her decision calls into question the determinations that were imposed by white racism anyway. Had there not been a very broad definition of the Negro, as the writer Playthell Benjamin observes, Afro-American history and culture might have been quite different. For examples, personalities as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Thurgood Marshall--even Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan--would not have been categorized as Negro. Would they have chosen to join the fight--as contributors or mulatto dunderheads--if they hadn’t been trapped in an inclusive “prison of color”?

Njeri is aware of this irony. She knows that the divvying up of federal monies on the basis of percentages and that the quota world of who’s been zoomed by whom is challenged by these new categories. This puts the kind of identity politics we have been accustomed to for the last three decades in great jeopardy. If the country starts recognizing the epic varieties of our bloodlines, will we come closer to knowing who we actually are or will we use this to increasingly balkanize the population and still hide under the bed when asked to address the problems that not only stand in the way of moving closer to equality but fog our perception of the alienated human heart?

Njeri makes us think about all of these things, as painful as they are. When she writes about a woman who hates herself for being dark, or when she looks into the shambles of Latasha Harlins’ life, or when she probes the problems Korean Americans have understanding the obnoxious behavior of certain Negroes in a country where work guarantees upward mobility, or when she looks into the corruptions wrought by our desperate belief in race rather than ethnicity, she is asking Americans whether they are willing to work at reducing the imposed kinds of pain that result from xenophobia.

Questions of this sort are as important to our moment as any. In that sense, “The Last Plantation” is more than a little important. As with a smorgasbord, it lays out a lot. What you don’t like, you don’t have to carry away on your plate.