Military a key focus of Supreme Court argument on affirmative action

Race and gender should not be qualifying factors. Aptitude and ability should be the defining factors.

I'm going to disagree with some people here because we apparently forgot why these programs exist.

Let's say we have a race and for the first half the race some teams have been cheating. They've been blowing out their opponents tires and taking illegal shortcuts so they are way, way ahead. Suddenly the referees say no more cheating and further more we are going to give some preference to the teams cheated against to try to fix the earlier cheating. Now all the teams who were cheating are looking at their gains by cheating being eroded and crying foul and how it's not fair to them and that all teams should be treated equally (and by doing so locking in the gains from earlier cheating).

Generational wealth is a thing. We destroyed it for a segment of our population, purposely and maliciously. Now when faced with paying back some of our ill gotten advantages we want everyone to be treated the same. The exact thing we didn't do and as a group benefitted from. We may not have personally cheated, but we are on a cheating team.