"The notion that affirmative action--intended to be a corrective to decades of covert and overt abuse--could be construed as government racism is --I think--delusory."

         I can sympathize with the intentions that generated Affirmative Action, but a number of things went wrong. First of all, it only punished poor white males. Bill Gates never suffered from Affirmative Action. And then it was expanded to cover everyone but white males: women, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and on and on. So the people who paid the price became a small minority group in themselves.
         And then, to go back to the first point, rich white males didn't pay, so the group became even smaller still.