I agree with Derek's dad on most point...

I agree 100%, my uncle and his friend years ago both tried out to be police officers in Philadelphia and despite having higher test scores than two black aspiring police officers, they didn't get the job, it instead went to the other candidates. That shows how messed up the US is, employers should higher the most qualified candidates instead of trying to up their diverse employee stats. It's simply stupid.

BTW, this film is a masterpiece.

"You can't solve racism by forcing employers to hire black people just so it seems "fair"."

In principal, that makes perfect sense. The scene in question demonstrates how racism can grow on people and how it can be seductive when it starts to make a lot of sense from a certain point of view. I'm not accusing anyone in this thread as being racist or potentially racist, but I think you raised a point where clearly a lot of people feel is an area of great contention. Even liberal Democrats have a difficult time defending the logic of Affirmative Action sometimes.

Affirmative Action was put into place to try and combat the racist policies that were the very fabric of the country from the beginning. It's been fifty years since the Civil Rights Act, and while that seems like a long time, it's nothing compared to the centuries in which blacks have been indoctrinated as slave or second class citizens. Even though they made progress over the years, you can't just say "we're all equal now" and expect everything to fall into place. Not only will that take time (if it happens), but it will take action too.

Affirmative Action was meant to try and combat the deeply stemmed favoritism in hiring, which did NOT go away with the flick of a switch in 1964. That's not a question of morality, that's just plain logic. You can't end traditions centuries in the making with one little law.

Can we pose Affirmative Action in a certain light, where we can say it's ironically racist in that it takes race into account? I suppose. But it's also unfair to say it results in people being hired solely based on their race, because it's not.

I personally have a problem with Affirmative Action, but not for the reasons everyone is posing in this thread. As a matter of fact, I think it's counterproductive specifically because it confuses a lot of people in this manner, and that in turn creates resentment which is harder to fight.

Eh I don't know what 'phallocentric' means, but NO GIRLS!

I agree!

This film, and others, pander to latent racism stereotypes in the audience's minds and conjures up single instances.

US and UK history ignores many intelligent, talented black people who struggled to get a chance, and some who succeeded only to be airbrushed out.

But the racist west? Ignore it all and substitute with cr4p.

Affirmative action doesn’t mean that someone less qualified is going to get hired, numbnuts.

Well, the easy, and correct answer is: Makes it so everyone can achieve those same scores. Give disadvantaged people in the inner cities the same access to education that those in the suburbs get. Furthermore, the whole school voucher programs are about taking money away from inner city schools and give them to rich private schools.