> 1) Many people of that race may be independently wealthy and do not need help. Grouping people by race is a bad measure of “need”
But people are being treated badly due to their race. Why can't we use race as one criterium to decide who needs help? Why do we have to pretend that racism isn't a real social thing that affects peoples lives?
> 2) I haven’t heard realistic plans for actually helping people of a specific race. Helping poor people seems achievable, helping black people sounds presumptuous.
Well, if you define these plans as unrealistic you're not going to find realistic plans. But affirmative action for example is a very realistic plan - so much so that it is (or was) reality!
> 3) Race itself is a nebulous grouping with many edge cases.
Sure, but people are being treated badly due to those nebulous groupings with many edge cases. Why do we have to ignore that?
> 4) You could easily find other ways to group people to locate “disadvantage”. Religion is an easy one, but affirmative action based of religion sounds quite discriminatory.
Do you have statistics showing that a similarly statistically significant difference exists between different religions?
> 5) The focus on race is actually just racist. People’s difficulty of life is not measured by privilege but by actual experiences.
"The people who identify racism are the real racists!" isn't as good of an argument as you think. People have different experiences due to their race. Attempting to find ways to curb that isn't "racist", it's "normal social behavior".