In a job seeker’s market, that’s not so difficult to tolerate. If 90% of employers won’t even consider you, and robots + overpopulation = hardly any jobs are available anyway, that’s something else.
If 90% of employers wouldn’t even consider to hire me, I’d start questioning my CV, my previous work experiences, the quality of my school/university instruction and all the other possible causes that may have led me here, long before I start blaming robots or overpopulation. Or the patriarchy, for what it matters.
In your case, presumably, it would be the matriarchy that was holding you down.
The figures are hyperbole. It’s the principle that matters, and even if you don’t care for the principle of equal opportunity, the principle of a job seeker’s market doesn’t exist for most people these days. So, how would allowing more discrimination in employment make things better? By removing the tyranny of people of different races/religions/whatever working together?
If you hire people based on a meritocratic scale, you’re not going to change simply because you’re suddenly allowed to turn off applicants from specific countries/religions/gender.
Trust the free market to solve everything…
Sorry, I can only stand so much idealism per day, or I’ll start throwing rainbows and unicorns around. 
I trust people to be able to make choices that are better for them, be it about their lives or their business or anything. I find it better than having a group of people setting up arbitrary regulations based on:“We think it will be better for everyone, even for those people who’ll clearly not benefit from it. Greater good, mah friends”.
Yeah, letting the system sort itself out has always worked well in the past
Slavery was abolished in the US and Europe, but it took some time to get rid of the last remnants of its social impact. It originated in the middle east thousands of year ago and it was later imported in Europe. You cannot expect to go from “Blacks are not people, they’re objects” to “Let’s all be friends” in a short amount of time after centuries of slavery. IF tomorrow the middle east banned slavery (pro tip: not going to happen), modern day slaves would still be treated like shit for a very long time.
Well, except that, an entire century after the Proclamation of Emancipation, the US Government STILL had to force legislated race equality at literal gunpoint on a large percentage of its population, and they still fought it tooth and claw.
We 're not talking about some isolated quirky merchant here, you had entire State’s Constitutions that defined the segregationist laws.
I’m sure the ancestors of those “freed” slaves would have been happy to go along with your program and wait another hundred years or three to see if society would somehow miraculously evolve.
But if it were me, I would have preferred to see a little more pro-activity.
Oh wow. People may be lead to believe that if the state didn’t put his nose into this from the beginning, things would not have been that bad. Which is pretty much my point.
To further explain:
I believe that people are inherently good*. If you believe so, and you consider racism to be bad, then people will naturally skew away from it. Of course, if someone comes from years/decades/centuries of:“Green people are subhuman”, change is not going to happen in a quick way, but enforcing it a gunpoint is not a good solution. In fact, it led to the creation of many violent groups that fought against it.
If you believe that people are inherently bad (in this specific case: racist), then there would be no way to explain the vast majority of the western society considering racism something abhorrent. Unless of course we were talking about isolated cases here and there which could show up either from people coming from racist families/backgrounds, or who developed racism as a result of personal experiences. If the number of these cases is limited, which is what I believe, I don’t see the point in bringing them up as an example when the overwhelming majority of western cultures don’t support racism.
*= the definition of good and evil is not something I’m willing to discuss on a forum, I tend to stay away from walls of texts. For the sake of this discussion, good = not racist, bad = racist.
If there were no anti-discrimination laws in the U.S. many small towns would refuse to offer services/products to blacks, asians, gays, muslims, etc. Some businesses would make that decisions based on their own prejudices…while other businesses would be pressured by the community. They will easily give up a few dollars to show off their dominant position over others.
As for U.S. government offices there are court cases of officers refusing to fulfill requests for services (e.g. marriage license for gay couple). I expect these cases to increase as well.
That’s exactly what MLKJ was talking about when he explained why he was in favor of (what’s now known as) affirmative action.
The only part I don’t understand here is the state being masculine. Is this a men’s rights thing? (Just asking.)
I believe that people are inherently good*. If you believe so, and you consider racism to be bad, then people will naturally skew away from it. Of course, if someone comes from years/decades/centuries of:“Green people are subhuman”, change is not going to happen in a quick way, but enforcing it a gunpoint is not a good solution. In fact, it led to the creation of many violent groups that fought against it.
People grow up with certain expectations, and those expectations tend to stick, no matter what the previous or later generations think. 
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Hmm, that sounds like the opposite of affirmative action.
It wasn’t the IHAD speech. I’m sure it’s somewhere out there in cyberspace.
Oh, he was in favor of affirmative action all right. Just pointing out the contradiction between his thinking and his rhetoric.
And I was just pointing out the irony that Ibis & the Reverend recognized the same problem but had very different ideas about how to solve it. 
I don’t really find that ironic. As they say, the devil is in the details. When it comes to sticky problems like racial discrimination, nobody has all the answers.
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So how did that work out, race relations wise?
The US went so far as put a hopelessly unqualified man in the White House simply because he could pass for black. And now, animosity between races is worse than it’s been in a couple of decades.
If we want to stay vaguely on topic, this should be a question of should the state have a say in race relations? rather than is affirmative action (US style) a good thing?, not that the second question isn’t worth discussing for those who have the time and interest.
If the state had left people to their own devices in this field from the close of the Civil War up to now, consistently refusing to intervene when race issues came up and affirming instead that the law is silent on those issues (i.e. people can discriminate to their hearts’ content, as long as they don’t own slaves of any race at all), how would that unfold in your alternative history?
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