Current court has declared in several cases that affirmative action programs must be subject to most searching judicial inquiry ('strict scrutiny') and must be 'narrowly tailored' to achieve a 'compelling government interest.' Few, if any, programs can satisfy this court's stringent requirements for constitutionality.
Re. affirmative action (a term used to describe number of programs to help minorities and women in areas where they have experienced discrimination), more than any other policy, it has led to desegregation of labor markets, in blue collar as well as professional and corporate management, and in the public sector. Affirmative action is major factor behind significant economic gains that African-Americans have made during post civil rights era. Although controversial from its origins, affirmative action's race-specific approach (opposed by proponents of 'color-blindess') achieved its primary objective - rapid entry of blacks into occupational sectors where they had been historically excluded.
Liberals never made a strong defense of integrating African-Americans into existing job structures and knocking a hole into wall of occupational segregation (and face it, what socialist left thinks is generally irrelevant to policy debates in US). Why? Because liberals never made any real attempt to enforce Title V of 1964 Civil Rights Act that calls for attacking pervasive racism in labor markets. There's a certain irony to fact that Nixon's Republican administration broadened approach that has done more to advance cause of racial and economic justice than any other. Now, folks might disagree about Nixon's intentions - some claim that he wanted to drive a wedge between labor unions, blacks, and jews (core Democratic Party constituencies), others argue that his administration saw affirmative action as a way to manage crisis arising from urban riots, black militancy, and grassroots mobilizing *and* offer a specifically Republican civil rights initiative. Of course, Nixon would later come out against 'quotas' that his own justice department had successfully argued in favor of before Supreme Court when conservative backlash (trumpeted by 'liberal' press in early 1970s and little dispelled by liberals, in general) began. Michael Hoover