Merit as Race Talk: The Ontological Myopia of Merit Knowledge

Can merit be self-evident and anti-racist within U.S. academic evaluative culture? Race is assumed to be self-evident, and merit is no exception. Merit’s reality is not questioned as it is something that is obvious and identifiable within an academic evaluative culture. While scholars note that the definitions of merit reflect the societal elite's cultural norms and definitions of merit transformed to justify racial hierarchies in the U.S., scholars have seldom questioned the racial assumptions upon which these merit transformations take place. Specifically, what have the transformations in merit within the U.S. academy had to presume about race, its role in the social world, and how it operates within the U.S. academy? Conducting a knowledge culture analysis of merit within the academy from 1890 until present, the study argues the contemporary academic evaluative culture has inherited a presumption of the twentieth-century academic evaluative cultures: adjudications of merit are premised upon the colonized proving their assimilability. The colonized have served as fundamental backdrop for how to judge merit because merit in academia’s social world emerged as a language and technology to manage the inclusion of racial difference; or simply, merit as race talk. This myopia makes it so academic evaluative cultures do not question whether the study of merit is the same as the colonial study of intelligence. Given this myopia, academia could begin to explore alternative bases of merit knowledge that are not dependent on adjudicating colonized communities' worth.