A little unrelated context that sort of lends a bit of background to this will make things equal claim.

I was at one time an international non-white student at a US institution. After joining, during orientation I find out that the test scores and metrics required for international students is insanely high compared to US citizens. Like in a subject based international test, I had to score above 95th percentile while most of the students from the US did not even write the test or if they had, scored on average around 75th.

To add more context, I come from a country with far weaker education system and it cost me around half an year of savings to pay for this test.

So, I find it hilarious ridiculous when people think that any of these institutions are remotely fair. I understand how for these institutions citizens > aliens. Now try transplanting this context on to different race groups within the country.

I'm not a huge fan of affirmative action or its local equivalent, but I understand why it is needed and it is the responsibility of the government and judiciary to assess it's impact before deciding to do away with it.

I also wish they would focus more on things like, nutrition, good school environment, truancy, access to healthcare and so on for disadvantaged groups instead of trying to act at a level where most of the disadvantaged people cannot reach. Still something is better than nothing.

There's a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we're losing sight of the forest for the trees.

The aim of Affirmative Action, as a policy, was to improve the following metric: "wealth of black Americans compared to wealth of white Americans". (I'm using 'wealth' as a stand-in for all the good experiences we're trying to optimize for, and 'black' and 'white' as stand-ins for the various groups at play). I think most of us agree that this was the aim of AA.

We can, of course, debate on whether AA was successful in improving this metric or not. I'm willing to concede that it may indeed have improved this metric.

But I don't think that it's a useful metric in the first place. And I can't really articulate why. I'd welcome some responses to help me flesh out my thoughts.

I guess... it just seems racist to me to be comparing "oh, the Chinese group is making XYZ dollars but the Indian group is only making ABC dollars. Let's make sure the Chinese give some of their wealth to the Indians". That doesn't seem to be a productive way of thinking. Who cares how much money the Chinese make compared to the Indians, as long as no individual is being treated unfairly right now.

Like I said, I'd welcome responses to help flesh out my opinions.