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The Meritocracy and The Myth of The Self-Made Billionaire
A true meritocracy would terrify those in power
When I was in high school, we had one Black student in our entire class. Let’s call him Jimmy.
Jimmy was the kind of poor you didn’t have to squint to see. It clung to him like a second skin — threadbare jeans that didn’t quite reach his ankles, shoes scuffed down to the sole, and hunger sinking into the hollows of his cheeks.
We all knew Jimmy didn’t have enough food at home. The lunch ladies, with their hairnets and tired hands, slipped him extra slices of greasy cafeteria pizza when they thought no one was looking. Sometimes, we pooled our crumpled dollar bills together to buy him lunch.
This was the 1980s — Reagan’s America — when ketchup was declared a vegetable to pinch pennies, and “trickle-down economics” was supposed to rain prosperity. Let’s just say it never rained in Jimmy’s neighborhood.
But Jimmy was clever. The kind of clever that you couldn’t teach, the kind that was born of necessity and honed like a blade.
Jimmy had invented an ingenious scheme to feed himself.
You see, Jimmy wrote indignant letters to food manufacturers, claiming he’d found all manner of horrors in their products — a cockroach in…
