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I agree with Steve--the idea addresses some horrible imbalances, but the laws as written were designed to address the imbalances that existed decades ago. We have not fixed the imbalances, but they have changed, and those laws no longer seem to fit the job and education worlds as well as they did.
I'll believe it's "reverse discrimination" when Congress is over 35% people of color. That's when I'll believe that people are actually being selected for their jobs based on ability, without undue regard given to race. While I don't believe elected officials should perfectly follow the nation's general demographics, I'm also not buying that somehow, white males, who are barely over 40% of the population, are somehow so innately qualified for leadership that they just happen to be elected to 85-95% of the nation's highest decision-making positions.
Note that when Sotomayor was chosen for the US Supreme Court, it was questioned whether she could make decisions "without undue influence from her own personal race." But nobody asks whether white candidates are unduly influenced by their race... it's as if we're supposed to believe that "white" is a default, neutral condition, and only being different from that is "racial."
Affirmative action brings the awareness that race exists to a lot of white people who like to think that "race" is something that belongs to "those other people." It's perceived to be unfair, because many of those white people think that the previous conditions were fair, that if there's no outright hatred and overt discrimination encoded in law, there is no racial bias in decision-making, nor in the background that leads up to those decisions.
A bias towards spoken dialects that were taught in neighborhoods that, for over a hundred years, fought to keep any people of color out, isn't considered to be racist; it's "preference for good education." A bias against dialects that sprang up in ghettos isn't bias against race... it's against the ignorant, right?
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