We sometimes hear people say that blacks -- or women, or hispanics, or name-your-minority-here -- have to be better than whites to get ahead.  While I don't have any objective data to support that, my purely anecdotal experience is that it's true.  But the racist right uses it as a talking point that "oh, those poor self-pitying minorities are so abused because they have to actually work to get ahead!"  For that reason alone, I'm willing to assume that minorites do, in fact, have to be better than whites to get ahead.  But then I already despise the right, and when they get racist, well...

"There are just tons of blacks that never make it into college because they don't try.  Affirmative action will NEVER help those people because they don't want to help themselves."

I'm not so sure that "they don't want to help themselves".  The problem with long-term oppression is that an oppressed population comes to believe that there is nothing they can do to help themselves, so it's no use even trying.  Is it any surprise that some people feel so beaten down that they have simply surrendered?  That many of them may have developed racial prejudices in response may be merely symptomatic of the greater problem.

But that racism makes solving the problem more difficult, and that's why I think it's important that we begin right now, today, to ignore skin color in all our affairs.  There are much better and more efficient ways to address the problems that remain from slavery: poverty and not enough education.