Right on. Affirmative action is racism if you ask me. Those schools aren't lacking materials because of the color of the students' skin...

Sounds good, but first you have to convince people that there is such a thing as class in the USA. We like to believe that we live in a "classless society," despite all evidence to the contrary. Race is a useful proxy, since it's much more difficult to believe that we live in a race-less society.

Affirmative Action is Affirmative Racism. The government is saying "black people are stupid" by making affirmative action race-based instead of class-based. There are plenty of extremely intelligent black people who would put most politicians to shame on the basis of intelligence and academic ability. Shame on you politicians!

Class is a vague term, so try using "income" or "education of parents" as the criteria. I think this will need to be implemented before we reduce our reliance on race-based affermative action, and then our reliance on this system can be increased as we are reducing our reliance on racial categories.

Any decision made based on the color of someone's skin is fundamentally wrong, whether it benefits that person or not*. We may never achieve the ideal of a "color-blind" society but we can take steps to act like it, such as removing the racial classification from school entry forms, etc.

*Exception: Race should only be a factor when a doctor is deciding whether a certain medicine or treatment will be helpful or harmful to you.

You can frame this as "socio-economic" affirmative action: this includes the idea of income and, if you wish, "class." Ultimately, however, socio-economic distinctions and family income levels drive almost all social ills meted on many groups which are typically from racial minorities.This also avoids the finding "real" minorities. Indeed, at my undergraduate school it was a joke: all those who benefitted from affirmative action were recent, wealthy immigrants who happened to have the skin colour the school was searching for. They were not at all from the supposed groups who needed any "boost" whatsoever - and had been afforded the very best from day 1.

Here in the UK the government has incentives for universities to recruit from among those with little or no prior history of entry to higher education - the so-called Widening Participation initiative. While many universities in receipt of government funding have taken it up, some have done so with more enthusiasm than others, I think it is fair to say. Moreover some universities -almost whatever they do - have trouble getting past their image and getting people to apply from such a background (Oxford, Cambridge etc). Other issues here have been how to identify target groups (postcode [i.e. Zip code] was tried; now there is a focus on the performance of a student's high school], how you create incentives to do more WP work than just enough, and how you deal with that Oxford/Cambridge problem. The government has established an Office for Fair Access to ensure universities do what they can to make access independent of bias.

You can find more about our experience at:

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/ (on the Widening Participation policy)

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/hegateway/uploads/Widening%20Participation%20in%20Higher%20Education%208%20April.pdf (on the Office for Fair Access)

(Of course a cynical Brit like me would say if government were really enthusiastic about this agenda, why allow top-up fees for univereity courses and why reduce public grants to students? A cynical American might add that fee waivers, income-blind selection and well funded burasry schemes would also help).