It involves prejudging people based on their skin color. I don't know a better definition of racism.
The system produces results that are explicitly racist. It's judging the system, not the people.
If I said that of two people doing an obstacle course the one who gets held down and punched in the nuts for a minute and doesn't get to wear shoes is less likely to perform to their maximum potential, that wouldn't be a contentious assertion, right? Similarly a person who is more likely to start in poverty because their parents weren't able to build wealth due to explicitly racist policy, whose grandparents had property stolen from them instead of being able to appreciate in value and who goes to an underfunded school would be expected to under perform compared to their potential, right?
This is what AA is meant to address. Either there is something so profoundly wrong with black people that the labor they have put in up till now during the lifespan of the country is worth literally one seventh that of whites, that their labor in Seattle (for example, I know the statistic off the top of my head) is worth literally half that of whites (which is the implicit assumption behind affirmative action being racist, since it assumes that what it addresses is based on the race of the people rather than the racist history inflicted on them), or the history of racism is making a lie of our pretense at a meritocracy.
...Wow, I never really seriously put thought into that and that is a
deep rabbit hole when you dig into it.
How do modern Republicans explicitly attempt to disenfranchise minorities?
Voter ID laws, early voting day changes, gerrymandering and so on are deliberately constructed so as to disenfranchise minorities. They've lost scads of lawsuits on the subject. You can't throw a google search around without hitting a lawsuit they've lost. It's trivial. I know for a fact that in North Carolina they've lost a lawsuit on both early voting day changes (don't worry though, the Republican dominated counties were able to coincidentally remove the same days of early voting, and because they didn't go on the record looking up minority voting patterns) and gerrymandering along
explicitly racial lines. Good times.
That's your problem right there. Let's shit on a bunch of innocent people because other people who look like them did some shit.
Dammit. I am sad now. I thought we solved the problem. Your point seems to be "it is too hard to do the right thing so let's fuck people who didn't do the wrong thing because skin color."
There HAS to be a better way than to hurt people who did no wrong.
The people aren't their money or their family's wealth. They are not being denied any opportunities that weren't unfairly won. What was unfairly won however is the past wealth. Do you think that in the 1950s an opportunity was equally likely to go to a black or a white person? Hell no. Now consider that family wealth determines access to education as well as forms a hedge against downwards social mobility. Affirmative action is an attempt to normalize for systemic bias. You could easily turn it right around and ask why should we shit on a bunch of people just because they and their parents were historically shat on and make no attempt to correct them being deliberately consigned to poverty. White people are no more entitled to the spots that instead get used for affirmative action than minorities are entitled to the baggage of their past, but we act like both of these are the natural order of the world when it means we don't have to confront the history of things and what it means for us and our achievements.
Answer the question. Do it. What sins are you liable for? What wealth are you willing to give up? If the argument could be made that but for your 12th generation ancestor conquering a land he did not own, you would not be alive, would you personally volunteer to die? Of course not. Nobody expects you to. What is the solution? Bullshit AA? Fuck someone over because of melanin?
It's so haaaaaaard! Let's do nothing and let me keep all the wealth my grandparents and previous generations were able to accumulate in a wildly unfair environment.
At the very least, people trying to determine who's most fit for a position either at a job or school should account for the fact that because of money and real estate won when the competition was unfair I was able to go to a very good private/elementary school, an excellent high school and have a lot of parental attention that made things easier for me to achieve good grades, and so on down the line. Stuff like this snowballs. I'm comfortably educated and middle class in part because of that money. There's nothing that means I'm entitled to all those resources, and someone with more potential may have gotten fewer resources and appear less impressive. I like having my job and my life, but I'm prepared to acknowledge that it would be fair to normalize for bias.
It's not just minorities anymore. Modern Republicans are trying to disenfranchise everyone who doesn't vote Republican. Through gerrymandering, onerous voter ID requirements, and intimidation.
Hilariously it's still in large part along racial lines, more than could easily be explained by naked partisan motivations, despite partisan motivations being easier to defend in court. The only time NC tried to disenfranchise me or minimize my political power was when I was an out of state college student.