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NoSoup...here's the biggest problem i see with your argument. you say "if our goal is equality, in my opinion, we shouldn't be helping some more than others based on the color of their skin." you're missing part of the statement: it's only true if people are equal to begin with. if large groups have been dumped in holes they have to climb out of, treating everyone equally will serve only to maintain the same levels of imbalance in society that existed before.
my views on this subject as a whole have changed dramatically in the past five years. i've applied to college, gone, graduated in 3 years, applied to law school, and gone there too. it sucks. don't go. anyway, i see plenty of people who didn't have the same sat/lsat scores i did that got into better colleges than me. is it fair? not really. is it good policy? probably. my parents worked for what they have, but they had enough to lay out 13 G's for private school, and i know that i got 34hrs of college credit, among other things, from having a chance to go to private school. looking back, do i understand why some "less deserving" minorities got into schools that i didn't? yeah. did it piss me off when it happened? yeah, but the thing is, for every minority you can find that gets affirmative action admission to your favorite school, i can find four fairly privileged white kids who were squarely on the fence but got turned down. it's not perfect. i think it's ridiculous that the rich black girl at my private school gets her choice of college even though my SAT is over 200 pts higher, but she also spent four years as the only black girl in her class, so it's not like there are too many others like her.
since all things go back to baseball, i'll borrow this bit from a quality book: two guys run to first in fairly similar times. one runs with perfect form and gets down the basepaths smoothly. the other runs a little wild, and may be slightly inefficient in making the trek. who do you take? answer: the one without the form. he's already about as fast as the other guy, and he can be taught to run with form, making him better long-term.
ps...quotas aren't real. don't talk about them. the college i went to had well over 20,000 students, and in a class of 4500 freshmen, they had 200 black kids show up. this isn't wisconsin either. the state's about 1/8th black, and they get 200 black students. sorry, but i got no problem letting in an extra hundred less advantaged students or minorities when the demographics at my school (and many my friends attended) are overwhelmingly full of white kids from middle and upper class homes.
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