You guys can pretend all you want, get hung up in semantics or "gotcahas". The simple fact of it is one demographic is given an upper hand while another suffers for it. If you don't think this is racism, then imagine if this was openly and systematically done to help white males get jobs and hire less minorities. You better believe it'd be called racism. You guys live in a leftist fantasy land.
This is like complaing how some people are getting free GPUs and money from NV after manufacturing defects killed their cards and you as an AMD buyer aren’t.
You were not harmed (and in fact benefited) from the governments illegal discrimination but minorities were harmed.
In a perfect world, I’d agree that affirmative action is discriminatory (barely). This isn’t that world. The US citizens harmed by the illegal actions of local, state, and federal government need a remedy for harms committed. If you don’t approve I would consider voting for politicians who will have th government follow the laws and not discriminate in the first place. Then we all don’t have to end up paying.
Finally how did you(and I) benefit? Assuming you did not recently emigrate here you’ve benefited from structural racism. You, your parents, grandparents, etc are better off than they would have been without racism.
They did not have to compete with as many (or any) qualified minorities for their jobs or for homes in better areas. They had more money which means your parents and then you started off better. Parental wealth his hugely correlated with academic success.
Even if your particular family is dirt poor they are less dirt poor than they would have been without discrimination while the equivalent minority family is more poor.
Plus I haven’t even touched on the cognitive load from poverty and discrimination nor the more obvious impacts from blatant discrimination.
So while none of choose to be born nor did we choose to pick the benefits and damages from structural discrimination we still have them. Until you can see 9 minority members or 9 female members of SCOTUS and it looks no different to you than 9 white male justices we’ll still be fighting discrimination.