This is something that would be worth writing an article on.
The first part is wrong, demonstrably wrong, harmfully wrong, and demonstrably harmfully wrong.
To take examples exclusively of black people, for the "demonstrably wrong" part:
Ketanji Brown Jackson has a deep command of the law, and a thoughtful, measured approach to situations. These qualities are critical for conducting oneself as a judge or Supreme Court justice. She has excellent credentials (e.g. for winning difficult cases prior to being a judge). Any way you slice it, she has merit. And that merit has been rewarded repeatedly, most recently by appointment to the Supreme Court.
Amanda Gorman's skill at evoking emotion and drawing the reader or listener into an understanding that goes beyond mere facts would make any poet envious--she has merit. And as a poet, her merit has repeatedly been rewarded.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a wonderful communicator, able to take complex concepts and dissect them, feeding the audience a piece at a time until they too grasp that complexity; and all without losing any of the wonder and glory of the system as a whole (primarily astronomy, but he speaks just as movingly and instructively about, say, the history of life on earth). He also can enunciate as good of a defense of evidence and rationality as anyone can, and can quickly cut through nonsense to the heart of an issue (his interview with Ben Shapiro provides several really good examples of this--even in an interview setting, he out-merits Shapiro by miles). He has merit. He has been rewarded.
James Baldwin has merit, and has been rewarded for it. Need we argue about that?
HBCUs develop the merit of many bright young people, including black people. They go on to do many important things, things where merit matters, and many of them do it well. Merit matters. Merit is rewarded.
HCZ, operating in a zone which you would have no expectation of anyone excelling at all, teaches people that it is valuable to excel and helps them to excel. Their students respond positively and do excel...and have college acceptance rates that should make the snootiest whitest most affluent neighborhoods jealous. It's built on merit: developing it, getting it rewarded.
Merit exists, and merit is often rewarded.
But it's not always rewarded.
When the ability to develop merit or to be recognized for it is systematically absent--and this goes for, for instance, poor white agricultural areas, too--a kind of the-fox-and-the-grapes situation tends to develop. It's not how good you are, it's who you know. It's how much money you have. It's how lucky you are. It's whether you're the "oppressor" or the "oppressed". It's anything but you, yourself.
And it's true. It's just only partly true.
And part of why it's partly true because developing and maintaining merit is hard. Some of the deserved rewards are pretty rewarding--wouldn't it be great to skip the hard part and just get the nice benefits? If you start off in a favorable position already, why not just keep all the nice things, but skip all the work?
So you can get into Harvard on merit. Or nepotism. Or bribery. They don't say it in those words, but that's what it is. So much more gratifying to pretend it was merit, after you used nepotism or bribery (via parents) as your route. It's still pretense.
And, furthermore, there's a level of discretion given to appointments and honors and so on. People in charge often have the leeway to ignore merit and go with their biases instead. It can be pretty awful.
So if you don't start off in a favorable position, why not skip all the work, if you might not get the reward?
But this doesn't mean that merit doesn't exist, or that it isn't rewarded. It exists and can be rewarded, but we need to help develop it and give space for us to recognize and reward it. Inasmuch as hiring someone for a job is a "reward" for their "merit" in being a good fit to the job requirements, hiring that focuses on the specific skills needed, that has pre-determined questions relevant to the position that you ask everyone, and a standard scoring scheme for collating different reviewers' perspectives, returns much less racially biased results than a more standard open-ended interview process.
The idea that merit mostly doesn't exist, and that it's never rewarded, is toxic and--given the demographic realities in the United States--structurally racist.
You can't stop people who have skill and talent and drive being recognized for their skill and talent and drive getting opportunities to further develop that skill and talent into something amazing. If you did manage to do this, the economy of the country would collapse as it was outcompeted by everywhere else.
But you can convince people for whom there is some doubt, for whom the path has been historically closed and who still isn't as open as it should be, that there's no point trying. You can convince people to accept the lousy hand they're dealt instead of demanding that at least they get to trade in as many cards as the game allows, and play the best game they can.
If it's a game, it doesn't matter. Here, it does. The game is life.
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I don't write many articles. If I am going to say something, I want to have a high degree of confidence that a lot of what I'm saying is correct, and I don't want to just complain about problems but also to propose solutions as well, if possible. We do not need more people rattling off half-considered ideas that feel good to them at the time. While it's beneficial to public discourse to have a baseline level of that, so you get a sense of sentiment (should you have somehow missed it otherwise), we have plenty already. I relax my standards somewhat for comments; for articles my standard is very high.
People contribute (or hamper) progress according to their talents. Have you researched alternative calibration schemes for blood oximeters that would allow them to be used on skin of every common pigmentation type (or at least detect when there might be a problem, and a more sophisticated instrument is needed)? Have you performed research into additional markers besides creatine that could be used more accurately to help separate different baseline levels (which were actually found in some black populations--the error was thinking that "black" is a uniform thing) of creatine apart from deficits in glomular filtration rate?--so we get a better "e" (estimate) of GFR?
Why not? Is it because you don't care? Or because your talents and training lie elsewhere?
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You say, "You want a solution? Help end racism."
But that is what I'm doing, including with the Beyond CRT article. I'm not just complaining about CRT being bad (or about Rufo rebranding "CRT" as everything bad). I have concrete proposals for superior ways to do everything people wanted CRT for, and explanations for why to the extent that CRT has mattered for anti-racism (and it has!), its influence has often been in the wrong direction (especially when it gets extended beyond law) so we need a superior approach. And after observing this for a while, and seeing how often the ideas of CRT are used to harm rather than help matters, I decided that this is a place where I might have a small chance of making a small positive contribution.
Writing the occasional article (and rather a few comments) is not all I do, but it's what's observable here.
In every single instance when the comments have to do with racism, I have only one goal: to help end racism. Not to feel good about being on the right side, not to be defensive, not to agree with people who are a different race or style themselves as anti-racists, or to express solidarity with anti-anti-racists, but to actually help end racism.
Likewise when it comes to any other actions of mine regarding race in the broader society. My life isn't devoted to it--talents are elsewhere, as I said--but there isn't anything else going on.