It is about whether it has a disproportionate adverse effect on another ethnic or under represented group (or indeed seeks to create one) and if it does then the policy is discriminatory in a negative sense, such as point quotas for African Americans in Universities that adversely affect White applicants from poor backgrounds, hence my opposition to them.
This tbh...
This is also my issue with discriminating on the basis of something as arbitrary as skin colour/perceived 'race'. You basically get a situation where the daughters of the (currently) most powerful man in the world could get a bit more leeway in terms of GPA score than Billy Bob the red neck inbread from bum **** town Alabama simply because their skin is a bit darker.
I doubt very much that academics in top US universities are inherently racist - most of them are likely fairly liberal and the US should perhaps give them a bit more credit than trying to legislate in some social engineering on the basis of something as arbritrary skin colour.
Minorities in the US, Blacks and Latinos especially, are more likely to come from a poor background though this isn't necessarily down to current day racism but is going to be the result of several factors - obviously including historic, albeit last few decades, racism but also having a greater relative % of poorer immigrants and simply starting from a poorer background to begin with.
It seems that poverty/socioeconomic background plays a big part in terms of college admissions too - if you're going to make an adjustment to account for the fact that some potential applicants might have had it much harder to make the same grade than others then this would make more sense.
You'd likely cover most of the hard done by people from minority racial groups simply by making a small adjustment based on parental income and the performance of the high school they went to. You'd also not give a needless free pass to the sons/daughters of very wealthy privately educated kids simply on the basis that they have different coloured skin.
Frankly skin colour/perceived race shouldn't even be mentioned on the application form but rather monitored separately. Could perhaps even go so far as to remove a candidates name from the information presented to the relevant admissions tutors so that 'race' couldn't even be inferred.
