There are people who are arguing it’s bad. They are either doing so in bad faith, or have the luxury of either never experiencing the racism that made affirmative action necessary, or never looked into the historical reasons for it.
A good place to start to understand why laws like this we’re enacted is Redlining
The TL:DR here is maps would be drawn that we’re used to determine how risky it was to loan people money. These maps would be drawn based on the ethnicity of the neighborhood (this can be verified, there are poor white neighborhoods). If an applicants address was in a neighborhood that was Redlined, they could be denied a loan.
A modern example is the NFL. In 2021 they were ordered to pay a billion dollars to retired black players. The reason? The NFL were “race norning” cognitive tests designed to see if players had suffered mental decline over their career.
Essentially if a white player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old (this example is made up, I don’t know the exact metrics) that player would be paid for their injuries.
If a black player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old that player would not be paid for their injuries. Because the NFL was working under the assumption that black people are fundamentally less intelligent than white people, so for them to be “damaged” they needed a higher level of mental decline to qualify.
This was happening in 2020.
The US needs affirmative action. We’re a wonderful country that does many things well. We also still have a fuckton of racists at all levels of government and business. We’re simply not there yet.