No, affirmative action is this: when two candidates are approximately equally qualified but one was raised black in the inner city and the other white, then it's best practice to choose the black candidate.
I would use more general qualifiers in place of those specific expressions of the problem:
"When comparing two candidates of otherwise approximately equal qualification, apply historical socio-economic advantages/disadvantages as modifiers to get their probable scores in the absence of those modifiers, then re-evaluate accordingly."
Compare it to testing two sets of children, one that was kept up all night and one that got to sleep after studying, and extrapolate writ-large.
In a similar vein, we can't make useful assessments about alcoholism susceptibility in Native American populations without first accounting for all of the historical socio-economic pressures that would likely drive a disproportionate amount of any given population to drink.
No, affirmative action is this: when a white candidate is only slightly better qualified than a black candidate, the black candidate should be preferred, even if the black candidate came from a wealthy home and the white candidate grew up poor.
Not to respond to a glib response, but the issue crops up when the minority population is underrepresented as part of the company/college/etc. So for Morehouse (for example, a historically black college in the US) the reverse might be true.
There's lots of literature backing this up - when you have a MORE diverse population in your company/college/whatever, it performs by almost any measure you can come up with, better as a whole.
