This is not one of the things that many people can agree on whether this is a good thing or not. One of the concerns is that affirmative action does not help the very poor, and that the help that they receive, mainly in education, is not enough, or is not continued enough to be helpful. Those criticisms are from more liberal minded people. Conservative minded people are concerned with the idea that people get different treatment, even if there has been a history of discrimination against that particular group. They also are the ones who are worried about reverse racism.
A problem with the conservative criticisms is that just because discrimination is now considered to be a bad thing, that does not mean that it has disappeared all together, and become a mythical creature. There is still quiet racism, along with prejudice and stereotypes, which do not help with anything, and are harder to unseat than rules that people have found to be unfair. Stereotypes can create prejudice, and prejudice can create discrimination, it just might be easier to ignore that, rather than the blatant acts of discrimination.
It is slightly hard to separate out the problems of race inequalities, with the problems of class inequalities, as some of the issues are all tangled together into a knot, and working on one issue, will end up linking with other issues as well. Questions about affirmative action lead to questions about jobs, which lead to questions about who has access to health care and to good schools for their kids, which comes back to affirmative action for school.
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