The Post has a good article on the history and impact of affirmative action in the U.S.

The conclusions are that the majority of Americans (interestingly, employers and the military in particular) favor keeping and strengthening affirmative action. Another conclusion is that affirmative action has helped insure that higher education enrollment mirrors the ethnicity of the population, as has happened in Colorado:

The right's argument for abolishing affirmative action is that disparities have narrowed sufficiently so that it's no longer needed. I believe that in a more complex multicultural world, diversity by every means is more critical than ever. And, statistics show that the right is wrong, in any case:

"Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the median black male worker earned only about 60 percent as much as the median white male worker; by 1993 the median black male earned 74 percent as much as the median white male," notes a 1995 White House report on affirmative action. "The male-female wage gap has also narrowed since the 1960s: Median female earnings relative to median male earnings rose from about 60 percent during the 1960s to 72 percent in 1993."

At the same time, the White House study found, the black unemployment and poverty rates remained about twice the white rates, and nine out of 10 senior managers in corporate America were white males.

We can only hope at this stage that Sandra O'Connor and/or Anthony Kennedy vote the right way this week...