Does affirmative action promote racism?

I can get where they were coming from when they created affirmative action.  It was designed to force white business owners to hire black employees and colleges to accept black students at a time when it wasn't their intention to do so.  I get that in a segregated world that had just legalized civil rights, affirmative action was something we HAD to do in order to enforce the new anti discrimination laws and give black people the chance to finally get a leg up in the world.  And it did a lot of good.

But at some point,  probably in the 90s, affirmative action stopped being the thing that fought discrimination against black people and started being that thing that discriminated against white people.

This is where the trolls come out to tell me how racist I am for saying anything bad about black people, but I'm not.  I'm being honest about the modern concept of affirmative action and being critical of any system that's based on race doesn't make you racist.  It's not racist to condemn racism even when that racism benefits black people.

See, what affirmative action REALLY does is forces businesses and colleges to base their hiring and admissions on RACE rather than qualifications.  It forces them to meet a quota and, in doing that, forces them to NOT accept someone who may be more qualified for the job or have better grades and have worked harder for that scholarship BASED ON THEIR RACE.

So what is affirmative action except racism against non black people?  And does affirmative action really just keep racism alive?

Now black folks are not going to like this.  They're going to say I'm racist for thinking such a thing because blacks have had such a rough time and face racism every day and need things like affirmative action to protect themselves against the big bad white people who want to oppress them.

But how does that genius Asian kid feel who got overlooked for his place at his school of choice because the school needed more black students on campus?  How does the black girl feel when she didn't get her dream job because they needed someone more Hispanic for the position?

Affirmative action doesn't just affect whites and blacks.  It isn't just racist against whites even though whites are admittedly the intended target and reason affirmative action exists.  Affirmative action is a double edge sword that can help and hurt anyone of any color.

Except white people, actually.  There is no quota of white people to meet.  In fact, white people are specifically left out of the quota which is racist in itself, but hey.

The point is that affirmative action keeps racism alive by forcing race to be the deciding factor.  That shouldn't be an issue anymore.  A person's merits and abilities should mean more than their skin color.

We don't live in that world yet and I get why we need to pressure employers and colleges to be more diverse.  But in forcing that diversity against everyone's will, we may actually only be making the problem worse.

It's a vicious truth, isn't it?