Race-based admissions was a pretend way to remediate slavery and Jim Crow without spending any money or focusing on the harms done to the descendants of slaves.

Race-based admissions was a pretend way to remediate slavery and Jim Crow without spending any money or focusing on the harms done to the descendants of slaves. Almost everybody who thinks that the racism of Affirmative Action was a terrible thing also thinks compensating the descendants of slaves for the unpaid work and legal segregation that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (and so on, 10-20 times) endured would be 100x worse. The reason for AA was because you couldn't get anything that specifically calculated and addressed the harms of slavery and Jim Crow past the advocates of "meritocracy." Was the literal pricing of slaves not the ultimate capitalist proof of merit?