Envision the Society We Want/Ask if Preferences Will Help Us Get There

America is becoming more and more a multiracial, multiethnic society.  Moreover, individual Americans are themselves becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial.  In such a country, can we tolerate a legal regime that categorizes people according to skin color and what country their ancestors came from--and then treats some better and others worse on that account?  Of course not

The longer we have preferential treatment, the more entrenched it will become and the more it will reinforce stereotypes (people will ask, why are we giving a preference to African Americans and Latinos unless there is something wrong with “those people”?).  Affirmative discrimination makes mutual respect more difficult, becomes more divisive as America become increasingly multiethnic, and feeds a vicious circle of failure and victim-mentality among those groups supposedly being benefited.  The time to end affirmative discrimination is now.