1) she had no idea how a constitution should work, and
2) no clue how political activist groups actually operate.

I’m not sure ‘metaphysical’ is the right word.

That ‘all men are created equal’ is a statement that there are no orders of clergy, nobility, burgesses, and peasants here (an aspirational assertion, not a social reality in 1776). Well, there were none in 1955. There was a mess of legislation and administrative practice which treated blacks as a subaltern population. The measures necessary to stop doing that were much less intrusive than the accretion of policy responses adopted.

My old law firm was correct, I think, in stressing that we should recruit on the basis of qualities that were genuinely valuable in the workplace, and that we should root out the strong temptation to overrate the abilities of people who were similar to us in irrelevant ways–not just gender or skin color, but hobbies and politics. I can live with extra effort at outreach in order to expand a talent pool that irrationally excluded people according to silly metrics or hollow badges of elitism. In the end, though, I insist on an honest and rational appraisal of genuine ability, however we get there.

So, which workarounds are unacceptable and fought?

I’m referring to the metaphysical commitment of the Declaration that “all men are created equal,” not to any scheme for forcing or even pushing equality of result.

I suspect you can adduce evidence that some time around 1955 the majority of whites concluded that it was wrong to treat blacks as a permanent guest worker population, or as an inherent subaltern class, or as a collection of untouchables. The only notion of ‘equality’ incorporated in that sentiment is that everyone faces more or less the same rules in a given venue.

(It was also around 1955 that Flannery O’Connor concluded that too much mundane ugliness was required to maintain segregation, making the effort not worth the candle).

Actually I think they were. I was in high school in 1964 and supported the civil rights legislation. But although I can’t place it at any specific time after that, and I don’t know when I first heard the term “affirmative action,” I think I saw immediately that it was a mistake. To put the best possible face on it, it was an over-correction in response to serious injustice. I think I saw it primarily as an obvious logical contradiction, however well-intentioned. The practical consequences maybe were not so obvious as they would become.

Someone mentioned lower black IQ scores. John Derbyshire made a remark a while back to the effect that affirmative action, and its later and increasingly pathological development, is an attempt to square the circle of that very unwelcome fact and our national commitment to equality.