It should be obvious (except to certain Supreme Court Justices) that affirmative action programs provide opportunities to underprivileged minorities but at the same time require them to work harder. You finished your Star Scout requirements in LESS time than more privileged scouts had.

Of course, the reason for the adjustment was the historical systemic discrimination built into the Scout system (there had been no Black troops in your area).

This is the nature of affirmative action programs (excluding the bogus scams you refer to which exist to favor White firms pretending to help out). They don't solve the problem of systemic racism, but they slow down the backward movement that systemic racism uses to subvert our nation's progress toward the fairness and justice that the Constitution promises for all citizens.

When students attending an underfunded inner city K-12 public school system are afforded the chance to attend a prestigious school like Harvard or UNC, they have to work harder than they would (on average) if they had attended an open-admission state school. More importantly, they have to work harder than wealthier Harvard students who had attended elite (expensive) private K-12 schools (which is why the wealthy parents sent their kids to those schools).

Schools like Harvard and UNC claim that the purpose of affirmative action programs is to increase diversity among their students. That's misleading at best. If competitive schools wanted to increase social / racial / economic / gender etc. diversity, they would eliminate legacy admissions. The purpose of affirmative action in higher education is and should be to provide underprivileged students who have been swimming upstream throughout their K-12 careers an opportunity to show what they can do when given the same opportunities as more privileged students.