The over-arching truth is always lost on the ignorant. Here's a gratuitous education for them, since they seem to be having trouble figuring this out on their own.

When people stubbornly cling to a morally depraved way of life that routinely excludes and disenfranchises an entire segment of the population, such as race-based slavery and its aftermath, it is the function and duty of our legal system to correct the errant course. Affirmative action became necessary only because: (1) a certain legal proclamation by a very conservative Republican president named Abraham Lincoln went unheeded, and certain backwards men of the south refused to accept that they did not have the right to abduct and enslave other persons (in this case from a far off land with its own advanced, ancient culture); (2) even the near-death of our young Republic by civil war was not enough to purge this renegade faction of bigots, who were not at all ready to relinquish their easy, fraudulent wealth and power in favor of ventures that did not depend on the exploitation of fellow humans; 3) the mammoth task of rooting out this ignorance proved daunting and segregation set in, prompting the superior minds of the recently-liberated African Americans to organize and, working within the framework of the Constitution, enunciate their own set of protected rights as Civil Rights, because they couldn't get it across to the bigots any other way; and (4) still, blacks in America found themselves routinely shut out of learning institutions, governmental offices, job opportunities, and the like, even persecuted for showing interest in them, due strictly to racism. Because racism causes so much damage to the forward movement of any nation, our lawmakers imposed guidelines on us to force some sort of inclusion of the black citizenry, albeit imperfectly.

If the racists in this country could have been surgically removed like the malignant cancer they are, we wouldn't have had to deal with the Courts' intrusion into the private sector. But our forefathers wanted our Republic to be inclusive, and designed the U.S. as a "land of opportunity" for anyone who possessed the honest desire of a better life, free of ignorance and want, without relegating men to lower classes simply due to the misfortune of birth - so the racists were allowed to stay, with the belief that they could be enlightened. Sadly, time didn't make them any better, and now we have the complication of reverse racism (the original cancer metastasized) making this a most dangerous brand of anti-American sentiment. True to the American way, affirmative action laws carried the torch to the next generation, in hopes of continuing the enlightenment until all who share our values are full, equal participants in society - when such measures would no longer be necessary.