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Colourblind meritocracy is the best public policy approach, I fully agree. However, the challenge to colorblind meritocracy is that certain people argue "We can see racial minorities are still disadvantaged, therefore your 'colourblind meritocracy' is a lie propagated to support a system of racial supremacy". That challenge can only be defeated by pointing out that sometimes certain groups get arrested more because they are more criminal, or score lower on tests because they are less smart, or whatever. The individual should still be treated as an individual, but you cannot justify doing that unless you have an explanation other than "systemic racism" for when people notice your colourblind meritocracy finds certain colours have less merit.
No I don't think so. If your goal is to be rigorous and fact based, then asserting a different simple explanation for a complex and highly path dependent process is more likely to be wrong. It's also just not logically how you disprove things anyway.
On a political basis, where facts don't matter, or where people are unlikely to be swayed by mere facts only, it's also not an effective challenge for the reason I said downthread: you're just confirming your opponent's biases.
I think there are many possible antidotes to the idea that we need institutional discrimination to fix prior discrimination and HBD is among the worst of these.
I don't know how the HBD vs racism argument got wrapped up with meritocracy, but it seems to me they are totally orthogonal . I wouldn't make someone with down syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, or extreme lead poisoning, or who suffered so much racism that they didn't learn to read, the CEO of my company, no matter how unfair their circumstances, no matter that their conditions is totally out of their control. Meritocracy doesn't need any explanation whatsoever for why differences in abilities exist.
But it is obviously the correct answer in those specific cases, at least. The reason Jews score well on tests is because they're smarter (on average). The reason blacks are arrested more is because a larger share of the crime is done by them. These are the simplest and correct answers to those questions. It might not be as good of an answer to the larger question of why groups are disadvantaged across the board, but it is the most accurate answer in those specific cases.
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The problem is there's already an explanation: there aren't really any differences in abilities, you're just discriminating. And that explanation is enough to get you to pay massive fines or go to jail.
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