"According to racist logic, Barack Obama is a Black man. According to the logic of freedom from racial categories, he's something else, just like me.

Barack Obama and I have our own legacy, a buried legacy."

Actually, it's a legacy you already share with many, many, many black people. THAT is the buried part. It always stuns me how so many people view racial mixing as something recent or new. Especially in this country. All you have to do is go to any black person you know well and ask to see their family album. It is very likely you will see black people who range from high yellow to red headed with feckles to mocha brown to blue black with long fine hair or braids or piles of curls or short tight do's or blue or green or hazel or brown eyes and so on. The diversity is staggering and this has been the case for so long that people must have "forgotten" about it.

So what gives? If you look like say, Obama, and have two black parents (which, btw, is fairly common), you don't have a special buried legacy but if you look like Obama and have a white and black parent you have a "special, buried" legacy? Sure..... The truth it's the same as it ever was.

Okay, I'm going to give you credit and assume that your reading comprehension is not that bad but that's a long way to go for such a thin anti-US jab.

I can see some of your point but you have to remember that aa as a public policy didn't appear out of nowhere. It was a response to a specific long standing problem and you can't really divorce it from that issue.

Rosenkavalier, I would not try and sell you on anything. That you think that someone would have to sell it to you is a tad presumptuous and telling.

"As a white person, what reason do I have to support a system that will give an advantage to other people's children over my own? I'm just curious as to what this argument might look like, and if it would look like anything other than white guilt."

As a white person do you have any concern over the systems of preference that give advantages to other white children than yours or are you just concerned with the one you think gives black kids an advantage? Anyway, it's clear that you don't know what aa is so I will refer you Robert Franklin's excellent definition:

"if Hannaham knows what affirmative action is or not. He seems to share the misconception with so many others who opine on the subject that affirmative action has something to do with quotas in hiring, school acceptance, etc. It doesn't and it never has.

The term "affirmative action" comes from a Supreme Court case. Its historical context was as follows: many employers had for years refused to hire African-Americans. Faced with changing laws, they reversed their hiring policies and dropped their all-white standards. Still, they actually had no black employees because they had no African-American applicants. African-Americans didn't apply because of the firms' well-known history of racial discrimination. When potential black employees sued the firms, the court held that, in the case of companies that had invidiously discriminated against African-Americans in the past, it was not enough to simply change hiring policies, they had to take affirmative action to find qualified black applicants. In other words, they had to go to job fairs at prdominently black high schools, etc. and let African-Americans know that the firms were open to black employees. But they in no way were required to lower standards to accept black applicants or set quotas for black employees.

That's what affirmative action meant and means. It's not clear if Hannaham knows that."

Again, that you interpet opening opportunities to blacks that didn't exist before aa, as "giving an advantage to other people's children" is interesting.

"Affirmative action ensures that mediocrities advance upward.

The problem with race or gender based affirmative action is that it too often results in the most mediocre and incompetent individuals advancing into positions for which they are ill prepared and, if such positions are in management, in which they either cause disasters by their incompetence, power hunger, or both. I've seen it happen too many times."

But how is that any different than non-affirmative action situations? The answer is that it's not. I think the flaw in your reasoning is that you might be assuming that, it affirmative action wasn't around, a true meritocracy would exist and that's not the case at all. Despite our high-minded proclimations, this country is, and has never been, a true meritocracy and it's unlikely to be one in the future regardless of affirmative action.