If you think a few decades of asking some institutions to diversify their population based on some criteria other than test scores has run its course and we’re in a position to move on to some other policy, you’re going to not only need to describe that policy going forward but you’ll also have to explain exactly what makes you think racism in this country is sufficiently dead enough to justify that position.

Because from where I sit, racism and bigotry are very much alive and well in this country, and I have no reason to believe that things won’t revert to pre-civil rights sentiment. In a lot of places, it already has. In others, that never went away.

That was true at one point, but a lot has changed since that time.

Like what? They stopped stacking black people like cordwood into boats and selling them like property? They stopped lynching black kids for looking at a white woman on the street? They stopped writing language into land deals that keeps black people out of the suburbs? They stopped dumping crack into black neighborhoods to keep them incarcerated? They stopped denying black people loans to build equity and wealth? They stopped unofficial policies about hiring whites over blacks? They stopped demonizing black culture? They stopped shooting black kids for being in the wrong neighborhood?

Please, do tell me that all these things are in the distant past, no longer relevant, and shouldn’t be in the smallest way considered when admissions looks at thousands of perfect test scores and says “we can’t fit them all in, so let’s try to have a diverse group here to represent us and provide some much-needed opportunity for a historically oppressed people, in whatever small way we can.”

Please, tell me that we are past affirmative action, and why.