Meritocratic Racial Quotas as a Universally Disagreeable Compromise

... a terrible idea, except in comparison to what we live with now.

The race question has been a fault line in American society from its inception. In the aftermath of the hypermigration of the early twenty-first century, it has only become more complicated and divisive, not only in America, but throughout the Anglospheric world. The rest of us imported American racial progressivism, and then commenced to import American-style racial problems. Thanks, America.

The question seems to ultimately revolve around who shall receive the economic spoils. The ‘equity’ that is endlessly referenced by diversity commissars is literally the home equity held by the white middle class, which the diverse and their champions openly intend to expropriate and redistribute.

The most contentious battlegrounds are in academic admissions and corporate hiring, in which the imperative is to minimize the number of White men, and maximize everything that isn’t White men. How the everything else is maximized is of no particular account. A team composed entirely of black men is just as ‘diverse’ as a team which also features Black lesbians, Arab homosexuals, and Thai ladyboys. It is the presence of White men that makes organizations less diverse: a team composed entirely of Black men, with the exception of a solitary White male token, is less diverse than the all-Black team.

For generations now we have suffered under the affirmative action regulations imposed under the banner of Civil Rights. For proponents, Civil Rights are a civic religion, and they guard the advantages won by adherence to their faith jealously. For the victims of affirmative action – which includes both those rejected from employment or university, as well as those subjected to the incompetency of affirmative action admits and hires – affirmative action is a hateful absurdity.

The underlying problem, which to this day only Internet edgelords will openly discuss, is human biodiversity. The various ancestral groups are, in fact, different, in ways that go beyond the merely cosmetic, to include general levels of cognitive aptitude, along with specific behavioural proclivities. To a certain degree this is due to upbringing, but only to a certain degree; upbringing can bring a child as close to his genetic potential as possible, but cannot push him beyond it. The best that nurture can do is to allow nature to flower; it cannot change nature. The natural outcome of this is that, under a purely race-blind, meritocratic dispensation, there will be noticeable and ineradicable differences in the representation of various races within any given profession.

Whether or not one supports a purely meritocratic approach to admissions and hiring then tends to depend a lot on whether one belongs to a group that is likely to do well, or poorly, under such a system. East Asians tend to support a more meritocratic approach, because their high test scores, good study habits, and strong work ethic mean that they will be extremely competitive. Blacks, on the other extreme, are far more skeptical of meritocracy, intuiting that a ruthlessly meritocratic approach would tend to see them pushed out of the professions at the expense of Whites, Asians, and Indians.

The current system is practically the worst possible system. The official narrative is built upon the foundational lie that we are all the same under the skin, and that any difference in group-level socioeconomic outcome can only be the result of bigotry, racism, systemic racism, implicit bias, and the historical consequences of slavery or colonialism. This lie has driven our society quite insane, leading in particular to the demonization of Whites – a large fraction of whom buy into the narrative of ethnomasochistic guilt with religious zeal, and another large fraction of whom reject this framing of their racial character as sick and ugly. To a large degree the culture wars are driven by this very division. In the American context, this division maps quite closely to Constitutionalists vs Civil Rights adherents, i.e. it is a holy war between the two dominant civic religions. It is not accidental that this also maps to Republican (i.e. those who wish to preserve the Old Republic built by the Constitution) vs Democrat (i.e. those who wish to complete the transformation of the Republic into something the Our Democracy they’ve been growing in the soil of Civil Rights).

As

William M Briggs

has pointed out ad nauseum, the prohibition of ‘disparate impact’ and ‘discrimination’ under the Civil Rights regime is an absolute nightmare for corporate America. On the one hand, to discriminate on the basis of race (or any other identity) is plainly illegal; on the other, to not discriminate is invariably to open oneself to charges of discrimination, as the various statistical differences between racial groups work themselves out in aptitude tests, SATs, grade point averages, or job performance. This places employers in the Kafkaesque position of being required to discriminate without being seen to discriminate. They must put their thumbs on the scale to ensure equal outcomes, without being caught doing so.

For Whites especially, this has been a very bad deal. Because no organization will ever be sued for taking on too many officially victimized minorities, there is no upper limit to the number of diversity hires; but if the student body or corporate org chart falls below a given group’s fraction of the population, lawsuits are almost guaranteed. This then produces an inevitable ratchet effect which systematically excludes White people from their own society, with corrosive effects on competence, morale, and confidence in institutions. It doesn’t help that, because we are still officially meritocratic, the leadership classes subject us all to constant gaslighting: we are discriminated against openly by people who brag about discriminating against us while insisting in the same breath that there is no discrimination. It is not surprising that many of us are ready to burn these people at the stake.

So what do?

One side would prefer to move to a purely meritocratic system. This would have the undoubted benefit of increasing the general competence of our institutions, and beyond this has the advantage of being, on its own terms, a ruthlessly fair way of doing things. Individuals are treated as individuals, without reference to their group membership, and allowed to find their own socioeconomic and professional level based purely on their own talents, skills, and work ethic.

The downside of a pure meritocracy is that, at the group level, there will be winners and losers. It goes largely unspoken by advocates of meritocracy, but everyone knows this. East Asians and certain South Asians would do quite well. Whites would do quite well. Jews would do quite well. Certain Hispanics (the White ones) would do quite well. Other Hispanics (the Native American ones) would do very poorly, as would most brown people, and the vast majority of Blacks. Sure, some of them would do fine, and those outliers who did would know that their success was purely on their own individual merit. Goodbye imposter syndrome! But at a societal level, everyone would be able to look around, and see that we had effectively developed a de facto racial caste system.

No one wants to be a Neo-Shudrah. If you’re Black, Brown, (certain kinds of) Hispanic, or Native American, pure meritocracy is a bad deal for your group. It will reduce your socioeconomic level, as compared to the present system, and it is liable to do so to an unacceptable degree.

Now on one level, I don’t really care if it’s a bad deal for these other groups, because Didn’t Earn It is an extraordinarily bad deal for my group. Meritocracy would be a much better deal. Under a truly race-blind system I’m quite confident that Whites would do much better for themselves than they are currently.

Pure meritocracy is wholly unacceptable to a large fraction of the population, who know quite well they’d get the worst of it. Didn’t Earn It is wholly unacceptable to another large fraction of the population, who are getting by far the worst of that, not only in terms of exclusion from the opportunities and positions that they rightly feel they deserve, but also in terms of feeling – correctly – that their society is being taken away from them, and given to others (who Didn’t Earn It). Right now the race communists have the whip hand, but this is generating intense social friction. Many mutter of the possibility of civil war, and indeed, historically, such disputes as those currently tearing our society asunder have often been resolved by a great slaughter.

Maciej Rebisz

So, with ‘great slaughter’ in mind as one potential way of resolving this issue, and with it being understood that reasonable people would prefer to avoid this, let’s consider other ways of resolving things.

The best way of avoiding violent conflict is a grand compromise. Given that the two sides of the dispute hold irreconcilable positions, any plausible compromise will of necessity be distasteful, and probably offensive, to all parties. The key is making sure that it is equally disagreeable to everyone.

The compromise I suggest is this:

Open racial quotas.

The idea is simple. The population is divided into various broad categories, which categories are themselves specified directly in legislation. The quota allocated to each group is proportional to its current fraction of the population. Any given organization exceeding a certain size threshold – say, to make calculation easy, 100 employees or students (we assume that no one cares about social clubs) – is required to follow these quotas when evaluating candidates for admission, hiring, and promotion.

Within each group, however, strict meritocracy applies.

The result is that each group competes only against other members of its group. Think of it as a broader application of the concept underlying separate men’s and women’s sports leagues.

Thus, American Blacks would be assured that they would comprise roughly 12% of any given occupation, profession, or student body. There would therefore be no question of Black under-representation at any given socioeconomic level. However, the rest of us – and Blacks too, for that matter – would know that those 12% were the best 12% that the Black community could provide.

Classical liberals will of course object that this would lead to a necessarily lower overall level of competence as compared to a strictly meritocratic system, which it absolutely would. However, it would probably produce a higher level of competence that DIE has been generating. It would place a sort of hard cap on incompetence.

The primary objection from Civil Rights respecters would probably be ideological. Quota Meritocracy explicitly acknowledges, as a starting assumption in fact, that racial groups are not in any meaningful sense equal, and that the only way to have ‘equality’ is to admit this as a fact and learn to live with it. It proposes, in a sense, to solve racism by being racist ... Ibram X. Kendi should love this idea.

The beneficiaries of affirmative action would probably also grumble about Quota Meritocracy reducing, in practice, the spoils that they can extract from the system, but because it doesn’t reduce those spoils to zero, and requires those who receive them to be as competent as they can be, that grumbling isn’t likely to generate much sympathy.

How might this work in practice?

In the US, we could just start with the existing racial categories used by the Federal Government, which if memory serves are something like Non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, Black, Asian, Indian, and Other. Whether or not more granular categories should be adopted is a matter for legislative wrangling, and this could become quite spirited if ethnic groups bundled together within the same official category begin to feel that they are at a disadvantage as compared to another, e.g. Philipinos vs. Chinese in the category ‘Asian’, or caste differences amongst Indians. Nevertheless, lines must be drawn somewhere for Quota Meritocracy to work, and these lines will always be somewhat arbitrary.

Another question is what to do with edge cases, i.e. those of bi- or multiracial ancestry. If there are enough of them, we might just make them their own category, but this would become quickly messy. At the level of individuals, the best answer is probably to assign them to whichever category performs the worst on the relevant metrics. A mulatto, being probably a bit smarter than a full Black, is likely to compete better for admissions to medical school against a slate of other Blacks, than she will against other Whites. By the same token a Hapa might prefer to compete against Whites (who he might have a small cognitive edge against) than against his full-blooded Asian cousins, raised by Tiger Mom strivers. A moment’s thought shows that this policy could even be mildly eugenic, over the long term.

Hispanic, infamously, is not a racial category at all; whether to keep it, or decompose it into its various constituent ethnicities, would be a political problem for Hispanics. Certainly the White-presenting Hispanics, descendants of castizo aristocracy, are likely to compete very well against the various Mayans and Aztecs who get bundled into this category, but then the Native American Hispanics might well complain about that.

Of course, we might go about endlessly disaggregating larger groups according to ever more finely distinguished ethnicities, which could quickly make the system overly complex and unwieldy in practice. If taken to its logical extreme, dividing groups into ever-smaller groups might result in simply an aggregation of individuals, each a group of one, and a roundabout return to pure meritocracy by the back door, as it were. While classical liberals would probably be fine with this, if a bit exasperated, as we have already seen, pure meritocracy is abhorrent to a large fraction of the population, and this outcome is therefore to be avoided. As a practical matter, there must be some lower bound on the size of a group, for it to be recognized within Quota Meritocracy. One percent seems a simple enough number, easily applied to the aforementioned organizational threshold of 100 employees. Consider it an incentive to have babies: if your group falls below the threshold, you get thrown into the dreaded grab bag of Other.

What about Whites? Should they remain, as currently, an extremely low-resolution ethnic category? Or would maintaining that status quo disadvantage some Whites – e.g., the Scotch-Irish hillbillies of the Appalachians – against others, for example, the Jewish descendants of the Ellis Islanders? No doubt there are good arguments to be made either way, but it is difficult not to observe that Jewish Americans, who comprise a negligible 2% of the population, seem to do disproportionately well in university admissions and in other fields; Ron Unz has written extensively on this, demonstrating overrepresentation levels as compared to Non-Jewish Non-Hispanic Whites of thousands of percent. Whether this is due to the inborn brilliance of Jews, the emphasis Jewish culture places upon education, the helping hands of sympathetic cotribal admissions officers, or all of the above, becomes under Quota Meritocracy a completely moot point. If defined as a people apart, Jews under Quota Meritocracy would be assured, as everyone else is, of a place within the system ... a very small place, admittedly, but a place nonetheless.

Some of you are no doubt wondering whether my tongue is in my cheek right now. That’s a great question! Which I won’t answer. However, it’s worth pointing out that Quota Meritocracy, which most of you probably think is an absolutely horrible idea, is undoubtedly more sane and fair than what we have now. As it is, the asymptotic goal of institutional culture across the Western world is to achieve Net Zero Whites by 2030. Quota Meritocracy would for the first time place a firm lower bound on the fraction of Whites allowed to participate in White Civilization, and is therefore, from the White perspective, a much better deal than the one currently being offered.

Thanks for taking the time to read this bit of provocation, which I hope is offensive to almost everyone. If for some reason you think this is a good idea, you should

it wherever you happen to waste time on social media. If you think it’s a terrible idea, you should also share it, in order to torment your enemies. You should obviously also

so that you don’t miss out on whatever madness I decide to comment upon next. That could be on almost any topic. You can get an idea of the breadth of material I’ve written about in the past here:

As always, my deepest gratitude to every single one of you who contributes their hard-earned, over-inflated currency to keeping the lights on here on Barsoom.

By the way,

Aleksandar Svetski

’s Bushido of Bitcoin is now available for pre-order. For the past several months I’ve been helping him edit it; indeed, I was supposed to be editing the last few chapters today, instead of sounding off on Quota Meritocracy. Sorry, Aleksandar! In any case, there’s a Kickstarter, which is very close to its initial goal. You can also get a free chapter. The promo video is amazing, and worth watching for its own sake:

Jiwook Lee