This inquiry would examine how others with the same social and cultural backgrounds deal with the obstacle. Thus given essential individualism, merit must be absolute standards to avoid such a group-based inquiry. If merit is absolute standards and people are essentially individuals, racial politics and exploitation are wrong because essential individuals receive benefits or burdens for reasons other than merit. Merit should determine the distribution of benefits and burdens. Racial politics are wrong because they ignore these standards in distributing goods to particular political interest groups, all the while masquerading as civil rights that benefit society as a whole.
Individuality dictates the level at which to look for harms and benefits.
The exploitation argument parallels the racial politics argument, except the context is the African-American community rather than society as a whole. Affirmative action distributes goods to individuals who do not need the help, under the guise of helping individuals that do. Americans are the innocent victims of this exploitation. More intriguing than how individuality and merit work together, though, is the tension between these arguments and the other primary term, colorblindness. This argument acknowledges that race is real, that it does have a stable meaning within our culture.