Structural disadvantage on the basis of class operates through mechanisms that are often invisible to those who benefit from them — the social capital that is passed through networks as well as inheritances, the ways that elite educational institutions reproduce themselves, the differential access to legal protection and health care that compounds across a lifetime. The meritocracy narrative is precisely the ideology that structural disadvantage requires to sustain itself: if success is a matter of individual effort, then structural barriers do not explain outcomes and need not be addressed. The examined version asks: what would genuine equality of opportunity actually require?
Juana