White males who are against affirmative action betray doubt in their own true merit.

Thank you for your thoughtful and expertly stated position. Sub conclusion 1. We are in agreement. The group dynamics you state are well supported by empirical evidence. I therefore do not contest that point. Sub conclusion 2. We are also in agreement here. Typically when someone has stake in a company and controls hiring, they will often show bias towards their own race, religion, gender, or political ideology. Because whites own the majority of businesses in the US, it stands to reason they would show a preference to whites. While blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and other minority groups will also show this preference for their own race, they are not large enough to have a limiting affect on whites. Sub conclusion 3. We are in agreement here for the most part. While it is technically true that past privilege has an affect on today, I would argue that there is a diminishing return every generation. This is not a point that affects my final rebuttal of your initial assertion though, so I will leave it alone. Sub conclusion 4. I disagree. Your assertion removes a person's agency. Your assertion basically states that the next generation will automatically use and leverage the the advantages given as birthright. It would be more accurate to state that when advantages are handed down as birthright and exercised by the following generation, they tend to grow. As an example: I did not go to college even though there is an admission advantage for whites and my parents are both college educated. Neither did either of my siblings. That limited example is one of regression, not progression. This is not a point that affects my final rebuttal of your initial assertion though, so I will leave it alone. Sub conclusion 5. I both agree and disagree. Programs are not what is needed; legislation is. We have made a very many anti-discrimination laws that are meant to reduce discrimination of minorities in all facets of life. Those laws seek to set right what was once wrong. It will take time to work and those laws have been leveraged in many cases to force compliance on non-compliant people. Demanding the system be equitable and punishing those that seek to inequitable, is the thr correct course of action. Affirmative Action (AA) does the opposite of the anti-discrimination legislation by giving preference to one race or gender over another. In other words, it tells white males that they are not allowed to show preference to anyone or they will be guilty of discrimination; however, those same white males are mandated to show preference to everyone that is not a white male. So AA is a contradiction. AA must then be resolved as white males must discriminate against white males to make non white males equal with white males. Mathematically it looks like this: Non White Males = +1 Non White Females = +2 White Females = +1 White Males = 0 That would be the theoretical value calculation if groups were looked at with no interrelation. However, once we look at them together and their interrelation value, a different value is made evident. Non White Males = 0 Non White Females = +1 White Females = 0 White Males = -1 This then shows that AA is not elevating anyone but non white females. Furthermore, AA is devaluing white males in order to give the appearance of elevation to everyone else. The path to equality can not be paved with inequality. You can not state that all discrimination is bad and then advocate discriminating against one group. That is morally bankrupt and worth fighting against. The lesson we should be teaching our subsequent generations is that everyone is equal. We should not be teaching them that everyone is equal except white males, who are less than equal to everyone else. Sub conclusion 6. While I agree with the conclusion, I do not agree with the logic that follows. Because we can not simply create a clean slate, we must work to erase the marks of the past with even eraser strokes. We must not mark over the whole slate with new inequality and declare a moral victory in wiping the slate clean. Main conclusion: As I have demonstrated in sub condition 5, those that decry AA are not doing so because non-white males are now equal with white males. They are decrying the devaluation of white males solely. They are opposed to it, not because they don't think they can compete on a level playing field, they oppose it because all discrimination is wrong and the road to equality is not traversed with unequal footing. I point you to the landmark anti AA case that was just won by white male firefighters. "The men sued the city in 2007, claiming the fire department illegally allowed promotional lists with their names on them to expire so they could promote African-American firefighters instead " http://usnews.nbcnews.com... In that case, not enough non-white firefighters made the promotion list because they scored too low on standardized advancement testing. So the State allowed the promotion list to expire and therefore denied promotions to the white firemen that deserved promotion based on their scores in the standardized advancement testing. Now your argument necessarily states that those white firefighter were unfairly advantaged because of past discrimination and birthright advantage. Furthermore, your argument makes clear that we need AA to step in and lower their scores because they did not earn them alone. They were aided by skin privilege. On top of that, we must also elevate the non-white firefighter's scores and/or we must lower the standardized advancement testing requirement for non-whites. This would then make it so that less whites were promoted and more non-whites were promoted. That may sound reasonable until you think about standard of care and standard of response the standardized testing is meant to show. We are, in effect, lowering the standard of service firefighters provide in order to equitably promote people based solely on race and not their ability to provide the required service. That is unequivocally unacceptable. People that rely on a certain response from these firemen should not suffer unduly as a result of AA. Lastly, I point you towards another group of firemen: http://www.silive.com... In this story non-white firefighters used existing anti-discrimination laws to successfully sue for discriminatory hiring practices. They allege discrimination on the basis that the city is about 50% non-white, yet the fire department hired less than 10% non-whites. The Judge looked at applicants and determined there was validity to the discrimination claim. Not based on AA though. Based on demographic of the city and demographics of the qualified applicants. Conclusion: Existing anti-discrimination laws are the correct route to equality. AA is not because it is discriminatory in nature. White men decrying AA are doing so out of a sense of fairness and equality. They are not doing it out of fear that they can not measure up on an equal playing field. After all, we are not giving them an equal playing field with AA. White males are justified in their fight against AA for moral reasons.