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Without it, both white collars and blue collars around black necks would shrink, with a huge, depressive effect on black income, employment, home ownership and education.

One piece of good news is that the Bush Administration, in the first Supreme Court case to come before it, chose to support federal equity programs for minority contractors.

Some argue that affirmative action carries a stigma which attaches to all blacks - as if we never suffered any stigma in the years before the phrase "affirmative action" was ever heard.

Why isn't this same argument made about the millions of whites who got in college as a "legacy" because Dad was an alumnus? Or who got a good job because Dad was President of the company - or President of the United States? You never see them walking around, heads held low, moaning that everyone in the executive washroom is whispering about how they got their job. No one suggests that white women, affirmative action's biggest beneficiaries, are suffering any crisis of confidence.

Since the nation was founded, all our elite professions have been the special preserve of white men - and they remain so today, from membership in the House and Senate to the heads of Fortune 500 companies to the tenured faculty at the nation's colleges and universities.

I seriously doubt if a single one of these men is suffering low self-esteem because his race or gender helped him win his position.

The most pernicious myth is that affirmative action's black beneficiaries are taking jobs and school placement away from more deserving others. The truth is there are not enough black people in America to pose such a threat, except to those seeking justification for their own failures.

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