Is the same thing as fairness.
Nope. AA was designed to get those discriminated against a way into the game, and it worked. Society is much less racist now and that is because there are very few of these still around:
Don't be silly.
You know very well it was a way to maintain power.
The Democrat Party was always the standard bearer for slavery, segregation, and second-class citizenship.
Pick up Caro's biography of LBJ....the author of 'affirmative action'....
Prior to 1957,
LBJ “had never supported civil rights legislation- any civil rights legislation. In the Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life;
even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching.” Robert Caro, “Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol.3,” p. xv.
So, what happened? An epiphany? The cynic in me says it was something else….