For woke activists, performance is a dangerous illusion with which societal inequalities are legitimised and market-liberal (“neoliberal”) attitudes are justified.272 A focus on performance can make the successes of certain persons in society appear at least partly deserved. The focus on performance-based justice makes it more difficult to interpret inequalities as proof of systemic injustice and to demand (more) redistribution for (more) equity. Woke activists often misrepresent the concept of performance-based justice. In reality, almost no one claims that a meritocratic society has already been realised. On the contrary, a meritocratic society is to be an ideal against which a real society should be measured.
From a woke perspective, performance-oriented narratives obscure how much privileges contribute to success: structurally caused problems are deliberately viewed as part of individual responsibility in order to maintain the power structures of the system.273 Woke demands for justice, quotas, and equality are in principle incompatible with an emphasis on performance.
Woke activists hold a conspiracy-theoretical view of success. In the woke conception, performance and competence play hardly any role as explanations. On the one hand, it is claimed that success is never truly deserved but is primarily the result of privileges that are not sufficiently compensated by redistribution. On the other hand, it is claimed that all problems of marginalised persons have nothing to do with their abilities, interests, or decisions. All positive and negative scenarios are allegedly evidence of how the system favours certain groups at the expense of marginalised groups (see Whiteness).274
Although the ideal of performance-based justice is highly valued by the majority of society, contradictory goals such as diversity and participation are pursued: woke experts want to regulate society until equality of outcome is achieved through equality (see Justice). Therefore, performance as a principle of evaluation is usually neglected. However, when it serves their own activism, performance is indeed emphasised: the claim, based on flawed statistics, that demographically diverse groups are inherently more successful than demographically non-diverse groups can be regarded as one of the most widespread lies of recent times.275