[Had I gone to this program, and once the white students found out I attended a program for the "stupid n*****s," I would never have been able to prove myself their equal as a scholar.]
Something similar to this is never spoken of on record but I have heard and seen it happening. When employers are looking at job resumes and it includes college experience, the black job applicants get points mentally deducted from consideration in order to compensate for the points added by affirmative action to their college experience.
The reasoning is, if you are comparing two job applicants (one white, one black) and they have identical college experience you just know the white student had to earn his way through school but the black student MUST have been helped along the whole way.
This is a terrible stigma to put on people and it is because of the soft bigotry of affirmative action.
I think this is a bit unfair. The black student's race may have been help him to get in, but once in, he is on his own. At the undergrad level, almost all schools have tutoring or math and reading centers available to all students, regardless of color. If blacks were helped disproportionately along the way, they would graduate at a higher rate than they do now, which is lower than whites.
Even Michigan's MBA program, a pretty good one, has a boot camp for new students who need a refresher in math. The difference, as I see it, is that the boot camp is for everyone who wants to take it. As most MBA students have been out of school for years and may not have used their math skills, this makes sense. What wouldn't make sense, and what would be racist, would be to relegate this type of help to minorities.
There's a lot to be said against Affirmative Action, but employers who downgrade a minority college grad based on imagined benefits of Affirmative Action throughout a college career are being unfair and are ignorant of the system.
This isn't a knock against you, spinestein, just against those types of employers. I've hired people, supervised them, worked in law school admissions, been on a doctoral admissions committee, and of course, been a student. I've seen it from all sides.