This seems to be the majority opinion on Slashdot. I won't say it's completely baseless, but if you really want to understand the people who disagree with you (which I'll give you the benefit of the doubt despite your snarky title and assume you do), you need to look at things from a more societal and historical perspective.
Blacks were brutally suppressed for hundreds of years. It's not just slavery. Black people were subject to terrorist attacks for minor things like using the wrong drinking fountain or saying the wrong thing to the local shop keeper's wife for a century AFTER the civil war and reconstruction! This is recent. There are people in living memory who can remember times where their family members were publically lynched by smiling whites, who proceeded to take photographs and circulate them as postcards. For a well written and highly accessible overview of just some of the history which has been making the rounds recently, you could read this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/fea...
Discrimination is not just a thing of the past either. People in current times are still de-facto segregated by race in most places in the United States, even if the laws and the optics of this process were forced to change after the Civil Rights movement. Black people are more likely to live in areas with poorly funded and poorly functioning schools, and to recieve poor police and emergency services. Multiple studies have shown that given the exact same qualifications, black people are less likely to be hired than whites. I mean LITERALLY exactly the same; researchers sent out resumes which were identical except for the names, some of which were "black" sounding (e.g. Tyrone) and some of which were "white" sounding (e.g. Phil). The black sounding names were contacted for follow ups at a significantly lower rate than the white sounding ones. In fact, researchers using the same basic design were able to show that white people with criminal convictions were hired at about the same rates as black people with NO criminal convictions, holding all other qualifications and background available to the employer equal. (If you want to read more about these studies, they are all mentioned in more detail in Michelle Alexander's book "The New Jim Crow," which I also recommend for anyone with the time and interest to read, if my recommendation matters for some reason).
This is not an insignificant set of facts, even from a business perspective. This is companies in America leaving money on the table for completely nonsensical reasons. This is a generation of talent being excluded from the market, and the problem will only get worse as the minority population of America grows but white dominated industry retains its hiring biases. Now nobody thinks that most hiring managers are sitting around the table consciously saying "hmm, this one's black, so we won't hire her." But hiring discrimination demonstrably exists anyway, so something is going on, probably subconsciously.
Preferential treatment for minorities and women (who have a similar history in many respects as other minorities) is an attempt to put a band-aid over these wider societal problems. It shouldn't be something that has to exist, but there is a case for it because these wider societal problems are not being solved, or even addressed by most Americans who seem to think that everything got solved back in the 60's, and nothing remains of white supremacy. The case that I want to make is that this is demonstrably untrue, and that the fact that this is demonstrably untrue is SIGNIFICANT. This MATTERS, and even if we can't solve the root problem immidiately, some people want to try and address the problem, even though the solutions that are within their power are less than perfect. You don't have to agree with this course of action. Hell, I'm not sure I agree with it. I probably don't, though I vascillate on it depending on my mood. All I want is for the case not to be treated as if it's crazy talk, or "reverse racism".
