Merit is a socially constructed concept masking group-based allocation

Evidence

Morris Abram, a former liberal partisan of civil rights and early neocon who served on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Reagan, proposed the extension of unionization as a better remedy than afÏrmative action for alleviating minority poverty and powerlessness (Abram 1984, 60). Thereby he merely indicated which groups he considered acceptable vehicles for political demands. Workers were apparently free to have collective interests, but people of color were not. Concepts of “individual merit,” as many writers shown, have the same shallowness. “Merit” is aconstruct too, as numerous studies of the SAT and similar exams have shown (Lemann 2000). Employers, schools, and state agencies need to legitimate the allocation of benefits, and to deny the validity of competing claims. But the means of judging merit remain questionable at best. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 194

Categorization

• XREF: Anchors existing race-theory/CRT vault claims about meritocracy as ideology hiding racialized allocation.