That article is just plain dumb and ignores the point. If by affirmative action you mean “giving a person preference in college admission based on a particular factor”, than this qualifies. However, that’s not what anyone ever means when they’re talking about affirmative action. This is a separate issue, either a “development case” (the child of a rich person who schools let in so that money flows to the university) or a “legacy” case (keeping up school loyalty by allowing the children of alumni into the school). Both of these overwhelmingly benefit whites.

This judge obviously ignored poor Whites, women, athletes, and the privileged like Bush Jr, all of them have benefited from Affirmative Action.

The President Might Ask Himself, “Wait a minute. How did I get into Yale?”

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/timep.affirm.action.tm/

Small matter, the days of affirmative action are gone forever and once all of the remaining court cases have been flushed through our painfully slow judicial system race based preference will be a thing of the past.

Enjoy these last few years of discrimination against non-blacks and non-Hispanics publius, they will have to sustain your sense of American inequality and injustice for decades to come.

If you study the statistical breakdown for U of M admissions from Grutter v. Bollinger there’s no doubt of this.

I would be totally supportive of a program that took disadvantaged backgrounds into account when granting admissions. A program that looks at a black kid and decides he’ll add diversity to the program regardless of whether he went to the same suburban high school as a white kid being passed over does not accomplish this.

I completely agree.

However, the poor (both urban and rural) don’t have access to good education systems, which are necessary for success. They also have to work in order to feed themselves, making finding time for doing homework or studying difficult, and many in urban areas also have to worry about not getting shot.

To say that right now everyone has an equal shot at great success requires ignoring reality.

EDITED: I don’t want to give the impression I agree w/Publius. My Kudos are to Sam.

One example: There’s plenty of evidence that people with culturally African-American names — who, on all other observable dimensions are the same — have much lower probabilities of getting jobs and being shown homes. See “Freakanomics” for discussion of at least some of this research. So, yes, there is persistent and harmful racism even today. Without regulation, black people really would be getting oppressed.

Even absent this, you ignore the link between the past and the present. Surely we can all agree that blacks are in worse economic condition than whites. And surely even a dust mite could see that this is related to past discrimination. Even if such discrimination didn’t exist today (which it does), affirmative action helps to end the bad cycle:

discrimination –> low wage + bad education –> unemployment + low job skills + poverty –>

The cycle can continue even without the discrimination. And if you claim that children of poor, stupid people have the same opportunities as the children of wealthy, smart people, perhaps you need to visit school districts in central FL or rural Georgia where not a single student in entire schools can break the mean SAT score.