Affirmative action revisited by J.R. Dunn of American Thinker

Helen Sargent, a southerner by birth and upbringing, has commented numerous times after visiting family and friends in Alabama, about how well the blacks are doing economically, and how comfortable race relations were in her old home town of Mobile.  This fact she attributes to the history in the south in which blacks and whites have shared space together for a long time, admittedly much of that time in a repressive, one could say evil relationship, and as such learned about each other and in many ways oddly came to be comfortable with one another.  For several decades now blacks have been returning to the south from the economically depressed mid-west and elsewhere, and seemingly are integrating comfortably in the new/old culture there.  Elsewhere in the country race relations are quite tense and can be said to have worsened under the Obama leadership.  J.R. Dunn here lays much of the blame for this condition on the polarizing effect of Obama playing the race card whenever it could possibly benefit him, and on the highly toxic effects of Affirmative Action and the inherent divisiveness of the policies, e.g. set asides, quotas, etc., of this political construct.  Objectively it is hard to see where Affirmative Action has had any positive effect.  What it seems to do quite effectively is pit race against race causing strained relations all around.  What's more the policy is the antithesis of the American can-do spirit of individualism in which each person is ultimately responsible for making his own way in life.  Liberals may agree with this thought but argue that blacks need a leg up to catch up as a result of the debilitating effects of centuries of slavery.  The downside of this latter argument is the dependency culture effect of Affirmative Action that liberals cultivate and nurture for political purposes.  Many thinking blacks agree that this construct has been counterproductive.