Affirmative Action has reappeared in the news lately mostly because the Supreme Court will soon hear a case involving the University of Michigan's Affirmative Action policy. Unlike many debates over public policy which are largely silly, I think the debate on Affirmative Action is an important one. Issues of racial discrimination and equality have plagued national political discourse since the Founding Fathers gathered to write the Constitution. Since then, the nation has witnessed a civil war, multiple Constitutional Amendments on the subject, a Supreme Court decision on segregated schools, and a massive civil rights movement. The result? We still have trouble dealing with racial diversity. Affirmative Action, while genuinely well-meaning, is seriously misguided.What bothers me most about Affirmative Action programs is not its practical consequences but rather its ideological foundations. I think that making schools of higher education more diverse is a wonderful idea that benefits society as a whole. But, I think that using this noble cause to justify more racial discrimination is foolish at best.

Though it may seem obvious, I want to explain why racial discrimination should have no place in college admissions. After all, academic institutions do and should discriminate on the basis of many things that, by and large, are unrelated to scholastic ability. Athletic ability, community service, and interesting hobbies are just a few examples of that. Colleges are also well-known to discriminate on the basis of geography and socio-economic class, which seem even more arbitrary and unfair.

Yet, I only object to discrimination on the basis of race. All of the other examples have given some, however minor, impact on the moral character of a potential student or faculty member. Anybody familiar with academics knows that character plays just as important of a role, if not more important, as mere intellectual aptitude.

Additionally, universities should be looking for diversity, and the best way to achieve it is to select applicants from many locations and different socio-economic backgrounds. Race, though, should have no place in this process. For one thing, skin color does not have any direct impact on moral character. Any indirect influence that race has on a person's character is the result of the person's location and finances.

Diversity need not be about race at all. It is about different kinds of people coming together from different places, with different ideas and different values. But different skin color? No. I believe that considering individuals on the basis of skin color is not only silly but also quite dangerous. Once we, as a society, acknowledge that people with different color skin have different educational needs, we start down a very slippery slope that, historically, often leads to terribly unfair discriminatory laws or worse: genocide. Most of the world's atrocities against minority races were justified on the grounds that people of different races are different. From this premise, it follows that different people deserve different treatment and so on. Is anyone else afraid of where this logic is heading?

When we discuss what makes us different from one another, we must differentiate what actual makes us different from what just appears to be different. This is often easier said than done because for human beings appearance resonates strongly and most of us, whether we admit it or not, still harbor racial prejudices. The only way to end the racism that stains our history is to recognize that while many things make us truly different from one another, skin color is not one of them.