It's because claims of true merit have for a long time been used as the justification for the exclusion of people systems have been rigged to exclude.
Just to pick the most obvious example, the US's slave states systematically kept black people uneducated and beaten down, and then used their condition to justify their ongoing subjugation. For example, from the Texas declaration of Secession talks about the how the Northerners had "an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law." In their view, the southern aristocracy were the obvious and true holders of merit, and the system that put them on top was just proof of their merit.
Or you could look at how women were systematically excluded for generations from education and economic resources, and then their condition was used at the justification for not letting them vote.
>Meritocracy beliefs have been considered "white supremicist rhetoric" in many programming circles for some time now.
I've read this before and when I asked for examples, all of the examples given involved either people who were kicked out of open source projects for being huge dickheads or companies who held recruiting events at historically black colleges and universities being called woke.
Do you have any examples of meritocracy beliefs being considered "white supremacist rhetoric"?
BTW you spelled supremacist wrong. I'm curious about what browser/operating system combination did not highlight the misspelling.
Honestly I still don't get it, I guess its just one of those first-world problems people invent to occupy their time with outrage.
But there is infact a large captive population of SWE's invested in these topics.