Affirmative action remains direly necessary in the United States to correct the imbalance of opportunity faced by people of color and to allow economically-beneficial upward mobility.

The case currently facing the Supreme Court — that of Abigail Fisher and her denial from the University of Texas — threatens to tear down this vital institution before it has finished doing its job.

To say that affirmative action is no longer necessary is to say people of color are no longer at a disadvantage in our society, an assertion that could not be more false. In fact, the median wealth of white households in the United States is still 20 times that of black households, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

One of the tenets of the American dream is upward mobility, defined as the rising from a lower social class to a higher one. However, people of color cannot access the American dream because of systematic discrimination.

While black people represent 14 percent of the population, they make up less than 1 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. Years of racism influence these numbers, and repealing affirmative action would only stagnate upward mobility and make the upper class even more overwhelmingly white.

“Color-blindness” does not work. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, black people are half as likely to get a job offer as white people presenting identical qualifications, and black people with clean records do no better in searching for low-wage work than white people with felony convictions.

Though quota systems disappeared years ago, removing race from college admissions would force schools to ignore a key factor in the lives of their students and an obstacle to their success.

The argument that affirmative action constitutes reverse racism is frankly ridiculous. Affirmative action is but a slight counterbalance to centuries of oppression and discrimination — nowadays often unconscious discrimination — faced by people of color.