Affirmative action and many other hot-button things can be dealt with by starting on an underlying layer. Pay more teachers in the real world and online; make college in the sciences and humanities free for everyone who can keep his grades up and there's no need for affirmative action in education. Make visits to a doctor or a nurse practitioner and basic medical care including reliable contraception (and morning-after methods) free to all and abortion rates will fall by themselves. Pay for all this by cutting military spending back to realistic peacetime levels, and make that possible by finding everyone who is a millionaire because of war, the executive and investor alike, and putting him in prison for war profiteering, by way of stopping treasury-busting military adventures before they start. Also buttress the social safety net and pay to develop renewable energy by nationalizing resources that are in the ground and under the sea. And if in the resulting health-secure and well-educated and sustainable U.S. a handful of old men still can buy designer medical procedures and a four-year Greek-letter-house alcohol party for their grandkids and an aircraft carrier to drive to the club in, and a few very poor people risk their lives to come here illegally and pick food and so make groceries astoundingly cheap and enliven the musical culture on their way to learning good Murrukan English, so what? But I think a lot of people, probably most of us, have been voting for exactly these perfectly reasonable reforms --free education, national health care, curing war, etcetera-- all our political lives, and the people who imply supporting them and actually sometimes outright promise them, when elected only pretend to deliver, taking us one step forward and two steps back, and that's the real problem to solve. Not whether some white kid who didn't make the cut in the first place feels not only cheated but especially cheated, because he is, you know, white.