That’s the title of a New York Times op-ed over the weekend by Dr. Damon Tweedy, but here’s the comment I sent to the Times:

Dr. Tweedy offers only two justifications for racial preferences in med school admissions: that many black patients prefer black doctors, and that African-American doctors are more likely to work in underserved areas.
Both are shaky as an empirical matter (see Sally Satel’s book PC, MD on the first, and the second was rejected by Justice Powell in his Bakke opinion), and both are shaky as a matter of policy (we wouldn’t indulge nonblack patients’ reluctance to have a black doctor, and there are more direct ways to improve service in underserved areas than the convoluted one of admitting doctors we hope might someday practice there).
But even if there is something to them, they would not justify the many costs of racial discrimination in university admissions — the unfairness, divisiveness, stigmatization, “mismatch” problem leading to lower graduation rates, and on and on. And in particular in this context, there is the cost to future patients of turning down the most qualified applicants and instead admitting less qualified individuals to become doctors. Is that ultimately a good thing for black patients? No wonder Dr. Tweedy admits finally that he is “ambivalent” about race-based affirmative action!