Part of the support for affirmative action is that many whites don't see it as harmful to them. Affirmative action kept in check the rising enrollment of Asians in the University of California system while as amplifying the enrollment of Blacks, American Indians, and Latinos. In doing my research, those last three races were called "underrepresented minorities" while as Asians weren't similarly called "overrepresented minorities."

Non-Hispanic whites make up 43% of California's population, and their admission to UC is about 35-40%. Asians represent 12% of California's population, but their admission is 36%. However Latinos, Blacks, and American Indians are underrepresented. So, a white freshman would likely have a neutral attitude toward affirmative action since they're proportionally represented.

White liberals who think they're being enlightened by supporting affirmative action need to consider what races are being curtailed to balance the ones being amplified.

If the problem now is not enough Blacks, Latinos and American Indians, at one point it was too many Jews:

As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in "The Chosen" (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard's freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: "The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also."