I generally oppose race-based preferences, but I have recently forced myself to think about them from a different perspective. What if I was the US's benevolen

I generally oppose race-based preferences, but I have recently forced myself to think about them from a different perspective. What if I was the US's benevolent dictator? I would be concerned with large, concentrated populations of very poor black people. To break the cycle of generational poverty, I could institute all sorts of social service programs and provide hand-outs. Or, I could game the incentives people observe so that they would be more likely to take actions that would improve their situation. Observing more people "like you" opt into higher education and get middle class jobs sufficient to buy homes in the suburbs might make you think that you too could achieve a similar outcome. But, if you had no such role models, you might decide that your fate has been pre-determined and make no effort to improve your lot. So, I wonder if the value of affirmative action is not to the individual so much as to the group. I still oppose racial preferences. As a teenager, I opposed them from a civil rights standpoint -- after all, they're a blatant form of institutionalized discrimination. In college, I had an experience that made me oppose preferences for a more pragmatic reason -- they can be cruel. I had a summer internship at a large company that made a substantial effort to recruit minorities. One guy in my internship class was a student at a small, historically black college in the South. He was a great guy...fun to hang out with, and had superb interpersonal and communication skills. Ostensibly, he was a computer science major but once admitted that his school had not required that he write "a program" in more than two years. This company, with all good intentions, put him in a very technical role for the summer. He failed miserably and accomplished nothing. On one of the last days of the internship program, I heard him literally sobbing to his mentor that he had accomplished nothing during the summer. He was right and smart enough to know it. If he had been white (or, more correctly a "non-disenfranchised" minority), someone would have told him that he could have a great career in marketing, PR, sales, whatever. Writing code wasn't for him, but it's not for most people, and that's quite ok. Had he not been wooed because of the color of his skin, he could have opted into a mutually beneficial internship with a PR firm where he would have learned a lot and gained self confidence. Instead, he got the message that he sucked.