Myth Of Meritocracy

The actual term “meritocracy” was adopted by British sociologist Michael Young in his book published in 1958, The rise of meritocracy(INSERT). Young has made it clear in the book and in many interviews that the term has a negative connotation which reflects on his disapproval of it. When the U.S slowly adopted the word, Young expressed his thoughts by stating that “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for other” (INSERT). Meritroitic notions date all the way back to Ancient China under famous philosopher Confucius. These ideas emerged because the Chinese wanted their people to advance on the basis of merit rather blood lineage. (Shifrer, D, 2013).
The U.S has embraced the idea of meritocracy as a social system where people are rewarded on the basis of their own merit with no influences of race, sex, or social class (insert). These meritocratic notions are

. . What we don’t need is the crass and deceitful politics of toleration that masks the sources of real power, that conceals the roots of real inequality, that ignores the voices of the most hurt, and that is indifferent to the faces of the most fractured.”
Said Michael E. Dyson in Giving Whiteness a Black Eye. I looked at this quote to illustrate the foundation to the myth of meritocracy. In a meritocratic world there is racial containment for the purpose of preserving the merit based rewards. Meritocracy takes away the microphone to those who are inherently not equal; leaving them to always be behind in a race that isn’t fair to them. To understand why meritocracy has been presumed a myth it’s important to understand meritocracy wouldn’t work out if there wasn’t