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The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways. Some time ago I read a book of MLK's speeches, and MLK frequently appealed to the idea that unless America can show it offers equal treatment to AAs, it's going to lose the battle for hearts and minds in the wider global context.
Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.
The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad. It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are, from Chavists to parties like EFF in South Africa to radical Islamists (who surely would be willing to say that there's no racial discrimination in an Islam, whether that's true or not).
Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade (and the Houthis have just shown you don't even need to take over to do that), the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine. Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.
Insist on believing the lie and forcing everyone in the country to act as if it is true, or suffer this imagined parade of foreign policy issues?
Naa, I'm not worried about Africans hating us. Africans are happily cooperating with Russia and China, after all, who certainly don't engage in affirmative action towards blacks. Providing special privileges for American blacks so African blacks will like America more would be a terrible idea even if it would actually work. I'm not actually suggesting we go back to the days when the Soviets could say "and you are lynching negros" and be correct after all.
Neither has a notorious history of anti-African racism to compensate for, though. And it's not just the Black Africans - though they're an easy example here precisely because the polls show that they are strongly pro-American and the current efforts of USA to recompensate past wrongs provide an easy partial explanation (there are other factors too, of course, like the work of American-derived Christian churches and so on), the US treatment of African-Americans has generally tended to globally be seen as symbolic of the wider idea of American white supremacy and "sins of the nation", so to say.
OK, fine, if Africans want to consider the US a terrible country forever because of past anti-African racism, unless we forever pay by engaging in domestic pro-black racism, I'm willing to endure their hatred. And that of the rest of the world too. Though I doubt any such change in hatred would amount to a gnat's whisker. This is just another in a long line of excuses to maintain these policies.
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