My affirmative action policy is better than my opponent's.

Thank you, TheAtheistAllegiance, for your response. 1) Clarifications This clarification looks thorough enough, but my opponent fails to consider mulattos, half-minority and half-majority. What is to be done for them? Are they black or white? I'd also like to know how Asians, who you have yet to mention, fall into your plans, as they are minorities, but have been more successful than even whites [1]. 2) Color-Blindness My opponent claims that "overall fairness" includes pushing towards racial equality between blacks and whites. However, I must ask why this racial equality is so important that one must discriminate between individuals based on skin color, which hardly seems fair to the cheated individual at all. If a white kid is rejected from a college based on skin color, what condolence is it to know that the rest of his race is doing better off? It cannot be simply because equality between groups is desireable, for then we open up a whole mess of inequalities. What if immigrants do worse than native-born Americans? Must we discriminate? What if Southerners and Northerners don't quite match up? Must we discriminate? What about left- versus right-handedness? Black versus brown hair? Tall versus short people? Where does it stop? TheAtheistAllegiance offers that this blatant discrimination "is fair when considering that blacks are unequal due to past and current opposition." However, if the two individuals are just about equal, then within their lifetimes, they probably faced just about the same opposition, as did their parents. What does it matter the cause of their parents' lower incomes, be it slavery or an uncompensated robbery or an insane lawsuit or a terrible decision made by a higher-up in government or just a long string of really bad luck or what have you? As long as the end result was the same, there's no reason for a third party to treat the victims of slavery any better than the victims of terrible luck. 3) Individuals vs. Groups It is true that the average black individual is less well-off than the average white individual, but in any comparison that my opponent's policy would deal with, he would not be dealing with the *average* black individual and the *average* individual, but merely two *equal* invididuals that happen to be of different race. I don't really know why my opponent stresses "individual" so much here when he's rather badly misusing the word; he's talking about averages, which are just statistics that relate to no real persons who actually exist. There is no such thing as the average individual of a group. He stresses it again in a metaphor relating to rungs on an economic ladder, but this still doesn't reflect anything significant, because black *individuals* and white *individuals* are actually scattered variably on the economic ladder, and discriminating between individuals who are actually on the same rung just because everybody else is scattered in correlation to race actually seems more unfair now that there's a ladder metaphor. My policy, however, actually does take into account the position of individuals on the economic ladder, which seems to be rather important to my opponent, without discriminating between equals. My opponent criticizes my plan because blacks will not be equal to whites in the long run. However, I can just as easily point out that by my opponent's plan, right-handed people will not be equal to left-handed people in the long run. I still don't see why equality between groups of people matter to any significant extent that could possibly compare to equality between individuals. Individuals should be defined by themselves, not by groups of people that happen to be like them. 4) More Averages Maybe the average black immigrant makes less income than the average white person in the U.S. And maybe this doesn't seem very fair. But in my opponent's policy, he isn't comparing the black immigrant to the average white person, he is comparing him to a white person who has the same income. There may be a problem, but discriminating between equals isn't the way to solve it. Ultimately, discriminating between equals is hardly a sound measure for promoting fairness or equality. Good luck, TheAtheistAllegiance. I look forward to reading your next round of arguments. [1] "In terms of race, Asian-Americans households had the highest median household income of $57,518..." http://en.wikipedia.org...