Affirmative action’s actual effects are seldom dramatic and often unintended

Evidence

We have, then, an electorate and many public and private officials who apparently seek a middle ground of “extra help” but not “reverse discrimination,” faced with a paired set of fiercely vocal activists who portray their opposites as either racist or un-American. … Its members too have no use for empirical evidence, not because they find scholars irrelevant (often they are themselves scholars), but because the most careful analyses show that affirmative action seldom has dramatic impact, whether positive or negative, and that it frequently has unintended and ironic consequences. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2023

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standing directive’s interest in concrete, falsifiable claims; the finding that careful analyses show affirmative action has modest and ironic effects grounds the claim.
• QUESTION: What specific ‘unintended and ironic consequences’ does the author have in mind here? Worth chasing in the chapter’s later pages or the source literature.