I think Affirmative Action has its place within the racial dialog. I'm not sure how affective it's been, but it certainly has afforded many minorities to get jobs that they probably wouldn't have gotten ordinarily. Not because they weren't qualified, but because they likely would have purposely been passed over due to the color of their skin.
Affirmative Action was suppose to be this means of "leveling the playing field" so to speak, a form of giving minorities (African Americans) our "40 achers and a mule" long overdue now four generations of former slaves. Myself, I'm not one of those African Americans who call for Affirmative Action whenever I see what I believe to be racial inequality taking place in the workplace. This is mainly because I think most corporations alread have strong equal opportunity policies in place and do a fair job of finding a racial balance between what is morally and ethically right in their hiring practises. That doesn't mean that some minorities still get wrongfully passed over; you just can't prove it without doing a whole lot of investigative work which usually ends up amounting to little or nothing (that can be substaintiated anyway). In other words, unless the act of racism is so blantantly obvious to atleast 3 people, you're really not going to get very far in a racial discrimination claim these days. You stand a far better chance of proving sexual harrasment than racial discrimation within the workplace.
Now, where Affirmative Action falls short, IMO, is where it was purposely designed to promote fairness: It forces companies to rethink their race relations & hiring practises. To that, I think sometimes companies overthink the race issue and instead of being fair and impartial they "find vacancies" to plug minorities into just to ensure that their corporate racial mix matrics appears fair. Is that wrong? Maybe...you could look at it as the wrong person got hired just to fill a quota OR you could say the right person got hired for the wrong reason - fulfilling the numbers game moreso than hiring the individual based strictly on their overall qualifications. That tends to happen in those instances where two people of different races (1 white, 1 black) who have very similar qualifications apply for the same job. Affirmative Action speaks to hiring the minority in such cases over the white applicant. No, it's not fair and that's where Affirmative Action falls short. But...
If corporate America were honest with itself as a whole, would most companies hire the black applicant who is clearly just as qualified if not moreso over the white applicant? I think not.
Honestly, in those such situations it's a lose-lose. The white applicant loses out on a good job and the black applicant gets the job but not strictly on his qualifications but by default. So, now the black applicant has to work X2 as hard to prove him/herself to be worthy of the "generosity" given. It's not fair to either side, but until hiring practises become impartical which for a very long time they have not (and to a degree still aren't), Affirmative Action will continue to be this contraversity issue born out of the Civil Rights ear where some African Americans are still demanding, "Wher'e my 40-achers and a mule?".