Reddit reviews Reflections Of An Affirmative Action Baby

This one pulled up his ladder: No 2020 Democrat is 'capable of beating Trump'

This one pretends all public schools are "equal": Universal public systems are designed to benefit EVERYBODY ...

This one never read An Affirmative Action Baby: [Carnell schools Harriot & Bootyjig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR83q8kjGFI)

LOL these "media influencers" need to get their acts together.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure I heard all these arguments first from a black law professor (Steven Carter ) and a black economist (Thomas Sowell). They are common views among those who have an economics-influenced worldview. (which is to say, more common among libertarians and conservatives than liberals)

To be more specific with regard to your bolded claim: in practice the intent to practice AA in colleges has had the effect of requiring Asian applicants to achieve much higher SAT scores than others in order to get admitted to the same set of colleges. When this has been noticed, the ideology seems to encourage covering it up or moving the mechanism which accomplishes it into harder-to-quantify areas.

I left off another argument, which is that AA helps already-privileged members of minority groups (who would have succeeded without it) while either failing to help or actively harming the less-privileged members of those same groups. That was the main thrust of Carter's book .

Of course, the body of ideas that constitute "AA" is ever-changing, just like the body of ideas that constitutes, say "communism". One can always claim some criticism doesn't apply to YOUR version of AA (or communism, or liberalism) and sometimes that is actually true, but more often it's a no-true-Scotsman effort. At its heart, AA policies are based on a set of premises about what is likely to be fair or effective or beneficial, and these premises are reasonably disputed by AA's critics.

(Side note: some of the past intellectual basis for AA used the concept of "stereotype threat", which has since been a casualty of the replication crisis.)