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• Unmaking affirmative action: Race-rigging college admissions is a zero-sum game
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Merit Was Always a Sham?

Wokeism assumes that merit was mostly an arbitrary white construct. Its use was to insist on ethnocentric and culturally exclusionary criteria to ostracize the Other. Otherwise, "merit" had not much relation with real competency.

Is that allegation true? We shall soon see.

But note first that few are saying to keep bar-exam grading static, or SAT minimum scores for admission the same, and thereby instead create a Marshall Plan effort in the inner-city to stop the violence, turn failed schools into stellar academies, and honestly critique single-parent households, illegitimacy, and inordinate criminality — as an effort to ensure African American youth are not just qualified, but better qualified meritocratically than those who are deemed to hold these monopolies.

[...]

We can ditto race-based criteria now used at the corporate and financial level, in high-tech, the military, entertainment, education, and in likely everything from movie roles to book contracts to national awards.

Again, such emphases assume that our current managers, professionals, and directors of the last 50 years were heretofore racists or were hired by racists. Or at least they satisfied artificially constructed high standards that bore little relation to actual skills required on the job.

Or they must no longer enjoy percentages in the workplace simply representative of their demographic percentages, but rather in reparatory fashion become underrepresented rather than just demographically correct.

To sum up, in other words, if there were similar race-based/diversity criteria applied to the current meritocratic NBA, would it matter all that much?

If African American athletes were by protocol and statute kept to between, say, 12-20 percent of the NBA player roster, to reflect the black 12-13 percent of the U.S. population, would it make that much difference?

Would the starting L.A. Lakers five, with one African American forward, one white player, a Latino guard, an Asian center, and a Punjabi shooter be all that less exciting, skilled, or successful a team? Are the current standards that accept or reject an NBA player constructed or weighed to favor African Americans that can be judged by their "overrepresentation"?

In the logic of wokeness, would the resulting appeal of a team — that "looks more like" a multiracial America — make up in diversity, unity, cohesion, equity, inclusion, and appeal what it lost in sheer abilities to make plays, dribble, shoot, rebound, dunk, or block? Were the all-white racialist and exclusionary teams of the 1940s really no different in skill and ability than the purely meritocratic 2021 teams? Of course not.

Again, we are going to find out, and in a number of professions, what happens when traditional meritocratic standards are replaced by woke guidelines.