A U.S. District Court judge struck down as unconstitutional the use of race as a prevailing factor in the selection of students for enrollment at the university.

This is an important ruling. We must understand the importance of keeping in place this strategy to upper mobility for people of color.

Without a doubt, affirmative action is an important part of the empowerment of minority populations in America.

Right now, there are several voices from the right calling for revamping, or in some cases, the total eradication of these programs.

That would be a consequence with negative results for minority groups, particularly, African-Americans.

Why? Because affirmative action is still a viable, necessary instrument of advancing the economic/educational hopes of minority people. We must not forget the hard struggle black people had (and some of us still have) in the job market.

We must not forget how hard it was for young black folk to get a decent college education comparable to that of young white kids in this country.

Millions of African-Americans have benefited from the opportunities afforded them through access to colleges and universities that over thirty years ago would not have given them a second look.

I mean, Ivy League schools like Harvard and Princeton as well as Southern schools like the University of Mississippi come to mind.

It is a proven fact, that with an excellent education, doors to advancement are opened to minorities. This in turn enables them to help other minorities pull themselves up.

In the long run, everyone in this country can benefit from this since you will not have as many people on the government's substinence rolls.

So I don't understand why some conservatives (even some black ones) can rightly say that affirmative action is just a race-based quota. Some have even gone as far as stating that it promotes reverse discrimination.

That is, white students or white employees are denied access to colleges or jobs because of a minority was unfairly given the go ahead. That is blatently false.

Take a look at any Fortune 500 company and count how many people of color are at the highest echelons of power. Look at any major non-historically black college/university and see how many of us are on campus.

We are a smaller proportion in both cases.

Affirmative action does not deliberately discriminate against non-minority people and even if it did, the reversal discrimination would be quite minuscule in comparison.

And those black conservatives, who embrace this same doctrine, have themselves benefited from affirmative action programs. Take for instance Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

He is steadfastly against affirmative action programs. Yet, did you know that he got into Yale Law School through such a program? He has even admitted it himself. But his excuse is that it was needed then but has now run its course.

Affirmative action was implemented to level the playing field and from what I have seen in America, that field is still rocky. And until the last rock is "chunked" out of the way, I still feel we need to make room for all Americans in this great nation of ours.

Mark A. Rawls