A pretty fair and balanced take on affirmative action.
We should insist on procedural justice — which is to say, we should insist on the rule of law and on the equality of all people before it. But we ought not allow that insistence to be a bunker into which we retreat when we do not wish to think too hard about the real social and economic distance between black Americans and white Americans. The fact that we passed a new set of rules in 1964 is not in itself an accounting for what came before or an answer to what has happened since.
Acerbity [əˈsɜːbɪtɪ] 