I’d take issue with the obvious contradiction between these two principles you enunciated:

“Like making sure that institutions don’t wilfully discriminate on the basis of race.”

and

“Like working out that when you’re dealing with a community with a history of being done down by systematic discrimination, you need to take special steps to support them while they get up & running (and that one’s for all the self-indulgent white folks who’ll come back and say ‘but black folks get special treatment all the time, that’s not fair, that’s racist!’)”

You can’t simultaneously expect institutions to avoid willful discrimination on the basis of race and then ask them to “take special steps” to support a “community with a history being done down by systematic discrimination.” If you’re writing something like this, you also may have missed my whole point, which is that it’s foolhardy to go rifling through history to find “communities” that have faced systematic discrimination. As I explained, many of us here, even those of us who look perfectly “white” to you, are immigrants from places where we’ve faced systematic oppression of one sort or another. It’s morally wrong to give some groups special privileges simply based on the fact that there are a lot of loud-mouths making a big case for them.

I would fully support something like affirmative action if it were based on actual, measurable income and assets, which tracks real “privilege,” not based on race, which isn’t measurable (is Obama black or white? what about Rachel Dolezal?) and which is not a great measure of actual privilege of any sort (there are many very poor and oppressed white people, and there are many black people, like most of the ones with whom I went to college, who came from affluent families).

We need to end the system of racial apartheid in this country once and for all. It doesn’t matter which race is on the “winning” end of that system. The system is wrong, and needs to be dismantled. Otherwise, we will just keep going back and forth on an endless seesaw that eventually erupts in an all-out race war.