African American Popular Wisdom Versus the Qualification Question: Is Affirmative Action Merit-Based‪?‬

I. Two Clashing Ideas African American popular wisdom holds that blacks must be more qualified than whites, and must work harder than whites to get the same job (Jencks 1992, 26; Mason 1997, 7). This idea conflicts with "the qualification question"(Carter 1991), the notion supposedly implicit in affirmative action policies, that black employees and/or students are either unqualified or less qualified than white workers.