Meritocracy can be Racist

Consider a well-designed meritocracy. It is probably focused on productivity instead of raw intelligence, has iterative testing and feedback, review committees, calibrates mangers and has an appeal system. For our purposes, let us assume it is the best thing an honest team could make and it works.

It is theoretically well-intentioned and knows no concept of race. It is a colorblind theory. It can also be terribly racist in practice.

Here is one potential mechanism: productivity is tied to education, and education of parents correlates highly with education of children. In this meritocracy a white person, who has a decent chance their great-grandparents were educated, will on average out perform a black person, who has a decent chance their great-grandparents were slaves.

There are other potential mechanisms. Committees and managers are heavily influenced by unconscious bias. Or perhaps the techniques used for filtering by the contractors your company employs for hiring aren’t scrutinized closely enough. But there is no need to get into the weeds, the first argument should suffice: a good meritocracy can be racist. There is no moral dimension to systems designed solely for optimizing productivity.

Practice matters. Sometimes we have to accept suboptimal optimization of one factor, because other factors also matter.