Affirmative Action is one of the biggest barriers to improved relations among different racial groups. There is the obvious reason: AA leads to resentment by the individuals that are discriminated against based on characteristics they are born with in favor of others who have far lower test scores.
Under the current status quo, there is a heavily discriminatory system. Take for instance, the MCAT:
With MCAT scores of 24-26, admittance rates for racial groups to medical school are:
- 6% for Asians
- 8% for Whites
- 56% for Blacks
With MCAT scores of 30-32:
- 58% Asians
- 63% Whites
- 94% Blacks
In other words, where Whites and Asians have a very remote chance of admittance, Blacks have a 50/50 shot. Where Whites and Asians have a 50/50 shot, it is a near guarantee for Blacks. This will obviously lead to increased anger when certain groups with vastly superior scores are discriminated against for admittance and scholarships entirely based on characteristics they cannot control. This same pattern emerges for GPA, SAT score, and other indicators of scholastic and professional merit. But this argument is obvious and has been repeated ad nauseum.
I think that for another reason, abolishing Affirmative Action will improve relations long-term. This is because the government's allowing of a racial basis for beneficial treatment inherently leads to the incentive to exploit that beneficial treatment. This creates an unending incentive to claim that a racial or ethnic group is oppressed simply so that it can reap the rewards of being a supposedly downtrodden group.
Previously, in the 1930s (before Affirmative Action), there was vehement protests when the census created the category of Mexican American instead of including them as White. Previously, LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) was very pro-assimilationist and patriotic. https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/the-invention-hispanics-what-it-says-about-the-politics-race
Hispanic is in general a meaningless term related to racial/ethnic identity. As a study of the term puts it "The Latino classification is distinct from all other racial or ethnic classifications employed in the United States as it is not based on shared physical appearance or geographical origin, instead Latinos are those who hail from a portion of the territories that once belonged to the Spanish Empire regardless of their ancestry or physical appearance. The diversity within the Latino classification means that it is unclear what is being measured when the Latino classification is used..." https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soc4.12836
This absurd term that means little in terms of cultural heritage or customs was created because having a racial minority status could reap rewards for such groups. There was a political and economic incentive to create aggrieved classes of people. That is why the term was adopted in the early 1970s, just as this Affirmative Action policy was created, allowing specific benefits based on racial classification. It was a categorization created to achieve power and receive government money.
In order to heal racial divisions, which are now apparently much worse than they have been within the past twenty years, very likely due to recent calls for "equity" meaning equal outcomes, which would require much more vicious discrimination than ever before. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
In order to heal race relations, we must eliminate the incentive for groups of people to demonize others and manufacture or renew long past grievances in order to receive governmental, scholastic, and professional benefits, while also rewarding assimilation to the American way of life. I'm convinced that, had we continued to will that people assimilate to American culture after the end of segregation and had not created systems of legalized discrimination in favor of minority groups, the race problem would be all but nonexistent today.
