>>I think it's the other way around. You'll know the racism is gone when everybody agrees there's no need for affirmative action. IOW, when the negative action vanishes, so can the affirmative.
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>No. When everybody agrees there's no need for affirmative action, and that agreement is not racially motivated, then maybe. But since a lot of racists hate the idea of affirmative action (not everybody who doesn't like it is racist, but some are), simple agreement that it's not needed is certainly not good enough.

I meant _everybody_. Since there'd still be those who'd hate the idea, there'd be those who'd see why it's still needed. I meant when that phase was over, too.

The mechanism is easy to abuse, and easy to do in a half-assed way just to prove it's wrong - as is pretty much anything that you have to rely on the opponents to apply it. We've had a similar thing, called "the [national] key", where we had to have the proportion of each minority in any representative body. In practice, we'd get a description from The Party, saying "your candidate should be a higher education Romanian" - we had two professors of that description in the school, one was a simple hard-working guy, not too interest in politics, and the other was a shady, money grabbing, sort of a con artist, Party member. Guess who was the candidate.

Or, there were those who'd use their minority status as a shield from responsibility. "You hate me because I'm Hungarian" - "Nope, we're firing you because this was the third company car that you smashed". Then the guy would win it in court and be back at work.