It's unforuntate that something as simple as AA can be dismantled, reverse engineered, analyzed and critiqued to such degree and with such troubling results.
AA is really simple.
Think of it this way. When your car needs an alignment or the steering column is otherwise broken, it can drift in one direction. To compensate and ensure the car travels along a straight line, you must counter the drift by steering in the opposite direction of the drift. This tactic successfully negates the drifting, producing the desired result: a straight line. That it requires compensation to produce what is, under ideal mechanics, the desired result, is simply a matter of life - if your car drifts, you must compensate the steering.
That is AA, right there. Society is racist and gender discriminatory. AA is a means of compensation to artificially produce the desired, ideal, result: parity between races and sexes. You might argue that society is not racist and therefore does not require an artificial method of stabalization, but if you made that argument you would simply be wrong: there is empirical evidence that society is discriminatory. As such, there are really two options: AA or Something Else. If you have an idea of what this Something Else is that can steer society back on course, by all means share it. If you have no idea what Something Else might be, you really need to accept AA and the faults that it includes by nature.
Of particular absurdity is this concept that AA itself is harmful to the very people it has been put in place to protect. Smooth addressed this issue best: any harm that you perceive towards someone who could have or has benefitted from AA is simply an aspect of your own mind, not an inherent attribute of AA itself. Since that is the case, it can be dismissed as the imaginary problem that it is.
And lastly, to those that claim AA is, itself, discriminatory - yes indeed it is. That is the counter steering affect you perceive. Of course AA is not what anyone could call a perfect solution. Rather, AA is the necessary reaction to discrmination. If you have the perfect solution, or even just a better reaction to discrmination, by all means let us know. But assuredly, you are entirely incorrect to claim that there is either no need for a reaction or that there simply is no discrimination. Racism exists, ignoring it will not make it go away and doing nothing about the consequences of it is to accept it and encourage it (if you never counter steered your car, you would eventually turn around, never getting where you want to go).
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...30#post1645630