Affirmative Action Should be Disallowed

This round is for rebuttal. I will attempt to address each point Pro offers. As a starting point, without apology for generality, I offer this quote as a frame to how I am approaching each.“With my academic achievement in high school I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that - there are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects. - Sonia Sotomayor“Advocates for affirmative action (AA) use the presumption of discrimination toward minorities as their main reason for AA. They claim that minorities have less opportunity and that by installing AA we are opening up convenience for them. Is this a valid assertion?”Pro opens by stating something that has made my eye twitch - “Convenience”. The issue I have with this word choice is, while the remainder of the statement is acceptable, this word destroys it. Affirmative action being referred to as a convenience is nearly obscene. Affirmative action is an attempt to realign a skewed baseline. Refereeing to it as “convenience” is so far off the concept… it makes me twitch. 1) A white guy and a black guy apply for a position. The black guy is better qualified; the white guy gets the position.2) A white guy and a black guy apply for a position. The white guy is better qualified; the black guy gets the position.I don't see any opposition to discrimination here. In fact, all I see here are two new instances of racial discrimination. Instead of fighting prejudice, it is being created. By using race (something that one cannot control) over merit (something that one can control), an unfair system is being created.There are a number of ways affirmative action is implemented. This example is a very common understanding for those opposed to the concept. No need to elaborate on each type at this point, I will address this example directly.Qualified. That’s where we need to focus on this point. Qualifications come from education, work experience, perhaps references. Each of these is have issues with systematic racism. Early education is still suffering with racial biases [1] poisoning higher education, and reflecting on qualifications of employees. Work experience has been shown to be skewed based solely on “black sounding names” [2]. References within a raciest system are similarly an uphill battle.But, we are to imagine the exact scenario described, regardless how unlikely it is in reality. If we could have the perfect example of the above, how would it be just? Tit for tat? Retribution? No. Its recognition of the underlining inequity, and adjusting appropriately. Not just for the sake of the individual attempting to get the job, but for the company (institution) to get the best candidate. If one is close to the other, but still not “matching” or “beating” the other in each category, but is recognized to have achieved nearly the same results in a system rife with inequity, the smart choice is on the minority candidate.To add, there is no evidence that black or Hispanic students have been admitted preferentially over the last few decades have suffered discrimination. Neither have white or Asian American students who have been rejected (even though they have received higher test scores, better grades, and more extracurricular participation) have discriminated against anyone else.This is utterly false. What we are to take from this statement is that racism has stopped a scant “few decades ago”. Legacy admission is still active in top-tier education institutions [3], providing the generational “wind behind your back”. School district results are highly impacted by funding, with school districts from poor and black communities showing higher and growing discrepancies [5]. Extracurricular activities are MORE available to wealthy students, and less available to poor students, there are more black students living in poverty, and very disproportional wealthy blacks to white students [6]. The issue with AA is that by allowing less qualified students in, you are pushing more qualified students out. By giving a seat to a black or Hispanic student you are kicking a white or Asian student out of their seat, all in the name of "racial inequality". You can't raise the floor for someone without lowering the ceiling for someone else - it is mathematically impossible.”“Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.” - J. C. Watts.Your assumption is that the floor is lowered. It isn’t. The strength of the hole is improved, rather than the gulf increased. The student that was perceived to be “pushed out” wasn’t given anything to take away. The seat was never owned by them, except for the case of legacy students – they “pushed” someone out of that seat. A student that is close, but not surpassing another may still have greater potential, regardless of current academic record. The admissions based “leveling” is reasonable and smart, unless you think that Asians and white students are biological “better”. Despite America being 12% black, the NBA is over 75% African American. Yet no one is saying that we need to institute racial preferences to allow more Koreans and Pakistanis play. The qualifying factor in making the NBA is how good you can shoot a basketball, how close to the rim you can make it, etc. The only way to get into the NBA is by merit. By applying the logic of AA, we need to eliminate merit as a prime factor and let underprivileged groups make the team! If merit is the qualification of making the NBA, why should merit not also be the eligibility of getting accepted into college?And kudos to them. American professional sports until somewhat recently had easily identifiable racism in player choice. A complete backwards system from merit based selection. With the elimination of that practice, what was found is huge talent in the ignored populous. The same is true of other, less visible endeavors.AA does more harm than good by ensuring that the people who benefit from it are often viewed as not being successful on their own. For someone who has had an AA success story, people can look at that person and say, "the only way they got to where they are now is because of AA. They didn't actually earn that spot" regardless of whether it is true or not.This sounds a little casual from me, but that sure sounds like a “you problem”. The perception of affirmative action by some is not a very good reason to stop a successful policy. I doubt that leveling of an unfair playing field would benefit from modification based on personal and uninformed opinion.Also, beneficiaries of AA who support it are admitting that they want to cheat their way through life. Let's say a black student is accepted into a community college because of racial preference. Do they want a preference to go to a university too? And another one to go to Harvard? And another one to get a job? And another one to get a promotion? And another one to get a government contract? That is simply unfair. The fact that they got a break should show them that they should be willing to compete by merit, not be carried all the way through life just because of their skin color.Inflammatory rhetoric at best, a complete bastardization of affirmative action at worst. Is a student that takes attends a predatory school a cheat? Is the young job applicant who secures a job with a friend of a father a cheat? That word is completely beyond justifiable in this context. But aren't they