Neoliberalism redefined affirmative action as the racism it was designed to oppose

Evidence

Affirmative action was considered unacceptable to the neoliberalizing stress on individual merit because it was taken to reward undeserving people on the basis of group attributes or achievements, not on individual effort and excellence. Indeed, for neoliberals committed to privatizing individualization, the standard racism – rewarding people for no reason other than their membership in a racial group – came to be affirmative action (or “positive discrimination” in Europe). Liberalism’s very instrument for undoing the effects of racism became neoliberalism’s poster child for the condition of racism itself. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1762

Categorization

• XREF: The inversion—the anti-racism tool recast as racism itself—echoes the dynamic in the reader’s knowledge of how reform instruments get captured and redefined by their critics. — connects to: Affirmative action was recast as the truest form of racism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1762; Neoliberalism functions as a response to white status threat. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1764; Nativists redefined discriminatory quotas as restoring racial fairness. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1923
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1762