In an age obsessed with representation, we risk forgetting what truly holds a society together: merit. In the American imagination, we once believed that excellence, effort, and personal responsibility were the golden tickets to opportunity. But today, a different ideology is being preached, a gospel of identity, where the color of your skin or the boxes you check matter more than the content of your character or the work of your hands.
It’s not that representation is irrelevant. Visibility can inspire. Diversity can enrich. But when representation becomes the measure of justice rather than a byproduct of it, we distort the very principles that make justice possible. A culture that prizes identity above excellence eventually erodes both equality and achievement.
The Mirage of Representation
We’re told that every profession, sport, or social institution must perfectly mirror the racial and gender makeup of the general population or else it is proof of systemic injustice. If a certain field has “too few” of one group or “too many” of another, activists cry foul and demand quotas or government intervention.
But this assumption rests on a false premise that unequal outcomes always signal unequal opportunity. Life doesn’t work that way. People differ in interest, talent, discipline, and ambition. To expect perfect proportionality in every domain is not only unrealistic, it’s unjust.
Imagine demanding that the NBA be racially “representative” of America’s demographics. Would anyone dare to suggest that basketball’s lack of white or Asian players is proof of systemic bias? Of course not. We recognize that excellence and interest, not race, determine who rises in that arena. Yet when it comes to universities, corporate boards, or tech companies, the same logic suddenly becomes taboo.
The Supreme Court’s Correction
In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a historic ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, declaring that universities could no longer use race as a factor in deciding who gets in and who does not.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, reminded the nation of a simple but profound truth: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” The ruling didn’t deny the history of racial injustice, it affirmed the necessity of transcending it through equality under the law.
The plaintiffs in the case, many of them Asian American students, showed that Harvard’s admissions policies systematically penalized their hard work and achievement in order to boost other groups in the name of “representation.” The data revealed that students with exceptional grades and test scores were being turned away, not because they lacked merit, but because they didn’t fit the school’s desired racial balance.
This was not diversity, it was discrimination disguised as virtue.
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