Somewhere along the decades, affirmative action “has lost its way”, said law experts Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. in The Atlantic. “The largest, most aggressive preferences are usually reserved for upper-middle-class minorities on many of whom they inflict significant academic harm,” they wrote, “whereas more modest policies that could help working-class and poor people of all races are given short shrift.”
“We want diverse stock traders, corporate-boardroom members, and tenured professors,” said Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker, but “it’s clear that what’s at stake isn’t a vision of social and racial justice that would ameliorate inequalities for a broad swath of people but, rather, a fight for spots in the elite ranks of society”.
“I think there’s a better way than what we have now,” a Harvard student named only as Kyle told Fox News. “You have people of color who actually come from really privileged families, and they’re getting benefited from this program, when you have people from other races who might not have any privilege in their background, and they don’t benefit from it.”
“Affirmative action betrayed black America,” said Inaya Folarin Iman in The Telegraph. “Far from addressing long-standing structural inequalities, it institutionalised the deeply racist idea that black people were incapable of attaining positions of excellence and high achievement on merit alone. It suggested that only through reliance on paternalistic white offerings could they ever succeed.”