I accept that your point is aside from the main point of my response, but I will answer it nevertheless.

There are many programs at work in this nation to help the poor, and of course these are all, should all be, as open to all poor, black white hispanic chinese and so on; and in a way America is classless in the sense that fewer people are held back by the poverty they were born into than in any other nation in the world. However, there are also a number of special programs directed at helping special cases of disadvantaged people, and I can't see why you would have a problem with these special programs.

You would hardly say, for example, "why can't we extend the programs to help ex-convicts, or abused women, or former drug addicts to all the other disadvantaged people in America?" The answer is that to do so would hamstring the special program and make it ineffectual.

The rejection that people with black faces or even just black sounding names receive from the rest of the white population has been well documented. Anecdotally, 20 years ago my late wife and I were told openly by a bank manager that he would be less inclined to look favorably at our application for a mortgage in some mostly white neighborhoods, than if we applied for a mortgage in Bedford Stuyvesant for example. As recentlyas about 20 months ago, a university study in Massachusetts, discovered that about 50 percent more loan and job applications were rejected from people with identical qualifactions but with black sounding names than from people with European type names. We've come a long way since the 70's but affirmative action, was designed as a special program to counteract the specific prejudices black people face, highlighted by the kinds of statistics that I refer to. My point is that as with other special programs designed to combat special cases, to extend them to others outside that specific program would do nothing to remove that specific inequity.

People who see affirmative action as reverse racism refuse to admit that there are specific disadvantages that people face that can be addressed in special ways without disadvantaging all the other people who don't have that program. Is it really unfair to budget for an extra hundred thousand dollars to build a ramp for wheel chair bound persons instead of spending it on upgrading the bathrooms which everyone could enjoy? So blacks have a special problem, documented, so is it really unfair to budget for a few extra places in the colleges to help them overcome their special disadvantage?