Affirmative action has to be racist/sexist, since how do you differentiate one person from another in determining who should be advantaged? More importantly, how do you decide what group a person belong to, do they self-identify. How about transgender people, do they get a special category for every one of the 35 different genders?

If someone is a half Asian, half black student. how are they treated? I have literally seen people quadruple counted by companies trying to conform to government affirmative action contracts.

So, on the face of it, Affirmative Action is racist, since it requires you to racially profile someone and gender profile them.

Not all things that help minorities are racist. Any attempt to insure them equal opportunity and treatment is not racist. For example, if companies were required to "scrub" race, gender, and any other information that would allow racial and gender profiling from an application. That would not be racist. So, how can you tell the difference between laws designed to promote equal opportunity from those designed to promote racial equity?

Anything that focuses on trying to manage outcomes using skin color is racist. It might achieve racial equity and if that is an important value, then you would favor. But it detracts from individual opportunity in favor of "group equity".

With respect to Affirmative Action, I did study the history of Affirmative Action and whether it worked.

Multiple studies show it did work for women. Not so much for African Americans. On every measure, by initially discriminating in favor of women, Affirmative Action was able to overcome the discrimination against women in the marketplace. In time, affirmative action for the most part became unnecessary. Given the chance, collectively women rose to the occasion.

African Americans initially enjoyed some of the same benefits. By imposing a "racist" standard favoring African Americans, affirmative action helped to overcome racism in the marketplace that was holding them back.

In other words, racism was being used to fight racism. The fact that racism was being used to overcome racism and sexism does not detract from the fact that the policy itself was sexist and racist, but the justifying argument is that it was necessary at the time. And if you want to argue it is still necessary, don't argue it isn't racist, argue that it is necessary. Those are different arguments.

But why did Affirmative Action work so much better with women than African Americans? Perhaps because with women, sexism was the primary obstacle for them being treated equally. While with African Americans the issue was far more complex.

For those African Americans whose opportunities were being limited by systemic racism, Affirmative Action was a solution. They were qualified and so using racism to combat racism worked. And like women, that group benefited from Affirmative Action. But that is no longer the case. Fifty years later it is not systemic racism that is producing the inequitable outcomes we see in our society, so attempting to manage outcomes using discrimination based on identity group is both inconsistent with core American values, but ineffective.

Affirmative Action served a dual purpose, it showed that if you remove racial and gender barriers that women and minorities could compete, but it also showed many problems could not be solved and so forcing racial and gender into the decision process of academic institutions and employers created a "new form of racism", perhaps better than the past racism... but still racism.

Research revealed that the stalled progress of African Americans, collectively was based on something other than racism (individually as you point those qualified African Americans who benefited from Affirmative Action had become entrenched in academia and corporate America as equals). You couldn't force it, unless your goal was to manage "outcomes" rather than force equal opportunity.

For most of my career, quotas would have worked against minorities and women, since I worked in health care which for specific reasons has always attracted a disproportionate share of women and minorities. At the highest level, more than 50% of medical school graduates are women and minorities represent a disproportionate share of doctors (partly because of the overrepresentation of Asians and the number of physicians that have immigrated from other countries, primarily non-white ones because we pay better). So, merit is working in health care and if we try to engineer equity it would work against minorities and women as a whole.

But what about the remaining inequities in our system. It turns out at the collective level; it is not racism but poverty and cultural values that explain the inequitable outcomes. Using Affirmative Action to fix that problem has more problems than it solves.

My brother has shown the way through his charter school. Affirmative Action has achieved what it is going to achieve and at this point it will create more resentment among people hurt by it then the benefit it could confer to those who benefit. For example, allowing a less qualified person to become an open-heart surgeon in the interest of racial equity is far more harmful than beneficial. Now if they are qualified blacks being denied opportunities then they should sue and I hope they win.

However, let's focus on the real issues impact African Americans success today. By far the biggest two issues are poverty and culture. If you are interested, there are plenty of studies in this area. Arguably, we do not discriminate enough among poor children and that is another issue.

For lots of reasons, people are not equal, and neither are children. Ask any teacher and they will tell you that teachers today don't have the time to help children including black children who have the opportunity to succeed from realizing their potential due to children in the class that are disrupting it. For a black child growing up in poverty this is like cutting their lifeline. Wealthier families can put their children into private schools, but black children are stuck with school system in their community unless charter schools, bussing, or some other option is available. My experience is that black parents that care take full advantage of these opportunities, but they are limited.

Rather than admit, some children cannot be helped we allow the whole group to go down and then blame a host of other reasons for it. Sadly, progressive liberals call for defunding the police and enlist black activists to their cause, even as 80% of African Americans want the same or more police presence in their communities. If we want better outcomes the answer is to work on preparing black children to succeed.

You can't fix "outcomes" at the college level and employer level if the underlying problem is qualifications (Affirmative Action only works when you are using it to fight racism... and that does not make it less racist... it simply is a pragmatic response to racism with racism).

I don't pretend or ignore the fact that racism exists. But it does not account for the unequal outcomes in our society and pretending that is "the problem", prevents us from addressing the real problem.

For me, son and his wife are all over their children getting the best education possible. My oldest daughter has a bigger struggle as a single mother assuring her daughter the same opportunity. She is doing the best she can, but all five of them are black and it is not skin color that is the problem.