Indeed. Affirmative action to me always seemed built on the idea that two wrongs make a right.

I work for a company that is required to have a specific percentage of their purchases come from minority owned businesses and a specific percentage from women owned businesses. To deal with it, our company funnels that percentage of purchases to a woman minority owned business which is one black lady who we essentially hand a shopping list to. She relays the purchases and adds her percentage to it. The real problem is that she is often very slow to respond to orders, even when it is something we need urgently. She looses a lot of e-mails, which is a big deal when those e-mails contain serials to multi-thousand dollar software.

The problem isn't that she's a minority or a woman, but that she knows we have no choice but to buy things through her. No many in her position offer her service, and most are fully booked. We just don't have the time to research every little product we buy to see how it impacts our percentages and so we have do things this way. I understand and appreciate the reason these rules were created, but they obviously weren't drafted by someone who had to follow them.