Because of that history, affirmative action, the evaluation by different standards of those individuals who have suffered from America's racial and ethnic tensions, becomes neither insulting nor illegal. In 1978, the Supreme Court, ruling on University of California Regents v. Bakke, upheld measures that give an admissions tip to minorities. In an ideal world, affirmative action should give a poor Black kid and a middle-class white kid the same chance at success, however measured.

But affirmative action in practice doesn't work as gracefully as the theoretical or legal model, and the middle-class half-Asians can sneak in the back door if they're willing to make the effort. This happens because employers and admissions offices lose sight of the fundamental purpose of affirmative action.

Polls show that affirmative action remains one of the civil rights movement's least popular legacies. According to the National Research Council, support among whites for intervention in the job market has hovered around 36 percent for decades.

From this widespread disapproval result euphemisms that cloud the purpose of affirmative action but make the procedures themselves more palatable.

So cloaked affirmative action programs push "diversity" for its own sake rather than racial fairness. Yale asks all minority applicants to describe "the contribution your personal background would make to the diversity of the student body." Stanford, to its credit, at least restricts the scope of its program to Blacks, native Americans, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans. But it prompts applicants who belong to these groups not to demonstrate how discrimination has harmed them but instead how "your ethnic/cultural background would be relevant to your law school experience and that of your classmates."

Both requests miss the point. Diversity alone doesn't warrant special consideration for certain minorities. Historical discrimination does. Whether your ethnicity has helped you shouldn't matter, but whether others have hurt you because of it should.

So the affirmative action system in its current form works imperfectly. Group identification reigns if the criteria for targeting and evaluation of candidates take no account of individual circumstance, and the results grow more inconsistent with the solid justification for affirmative action when groups undeserving of special consideration fall under the pro-diversity umbrella.

Most disappointing is the system's reliance upon the irrationality of would-be minority candidates like me. Most affirmative action programs work poorly as compensatory mechanisms unless those eligible minorities who have never suffered from discrimination opt out.

But can you expect undeserving minorities to opt out of a flawed process when they decrease their chances of surviving a competitive admissions process by doing so? One friend told me, "You should be glad that you can claim minority status."

But making that claim erodes the historical and moral foundation of affirmative action.

It's a shame that the illogic of the system encourages me to put on my barong, parade around in it and pretend it's been important in my life.