e was the first black man to play baseball at a level that meant he could join the team. The meritocracy argument would hold that other blacks were excluded only because they were not capable of playing at that level, and this is ridiculous. Blacks were long excluded simply because they were black, and how well they played, how excellent they could be, was irrelevant. There was a need to correct this situation and to achieve fairness, and so it can be argued that affirmative action actually produced a more meritocratic system than existed before when huge numbers of women, blacks, and other minorities were excluded not because they lacked merit but because their merit was not considered an important enough factor.
Merit is not an absolute value. There are times when it may be
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