Thanks for your comment, Joseph. By its nature, yes affirmative action based on race is racist. As you pointed out, it backhandedly treats black people as inferior, which goes back to the question David French asked about why we should being telling black and Latino students that they don't have to perform as well to attend the best schools.

I think many people feel more wary about the implications around race since the "anti-racist" movement has become so ingrained in our social discourse. In fact, a chart by Gallup shows that in the US, the number of white and black people rating relations between them as very good or somewhat good has steadily decreased since 2013.

When I was in school, I didn't give much thought to race except that our varying colors make humanity all the more beautiful. I didn't judge people's character or circumstances based on their skin and I didn't feel judged myself. But now, with all this rhetoric about "whiteness," race-based equity and our society supposedly being white supremacist in nature, I feel a lot of eyes looking down on me as a white person, seeing me as an oppressor or as privileged because of my skin. Here on Medium it's not difficult at all to find stories pointing fingers at white people as a group for the problems of our society today.

It is indeed a shame that our diversity as a society has been tainted by these culture wars and identity politics. Maybe I wasn't aware, in my younger years, of just how much anger and tension there still is around the racial wrongs of the past. But it makes sense considering the significant disparities between racial groups, which are partly due to the effects of slavery and segregation. I wish I knew the perfect solution to them, but I don't think anybody really does know. What I do know is that it's not to reintroduce segregation in the form of racial preferences in hiring and college applications, or non-whites only events.