Shavar Jeffries, writing in the Black Professors blog, makes sense on affirmative action:

This brings me to what I think is a more important point: the pragmatics of affirmative action. The Black community, like all communities, has limited political, economic, and cultural resources. We currently allocate a disproportionate amount of these resources to affirmative-action battles. I’m becoming increasingly skeptical that this is a wise use of our resources — primarily because I find affirmative action to be inevitably incidental. Affirmative action at elite colleges and universities, for example, presupposes a group of highly accomplished applicants qualified and competent to graduate from these rarefied institutions. If college admissions is going to be predicated on biased, anti-meritocratic criteria like legacy and alumni preferences (not to mention the attenuated relevance of the SAT), sure I’ll fight for affirmative action as a means of evening the playing field. But can I get apoplectic about it? Absolutely not. Not when less than half of Black and Brown students earn a high-school diploma; not when Black men are exponentially more likely to attend the “pen” Upstate than Penn State.

Even if you were to conclude that affirmative action helps some minorities, it is apparent to me that the number is very small, certainly not large enough to make affirmative action the life and death issue so many make it out to be. Instead of focusing on something that can help only a handful of minorities at most, one should focus their energy on something that can help an overwhelmingly large number of minorities - vouchers.