This article engages with the recurrent issue of tainted empowerment that employment equity discourses seem to attract (Crenshaw 2000; Robus and McCleod 2006; Sturm and Guinier 1996). These are the discourses of merit, standards, competence, window dressing, and fairness. The Nelson Mandela government promulgated laws which set the broad parameters of inclusion, access, and non-discrimination but these are unable to dictate the tenor, quality, and scope of everyday experience with regard to substantive empowerment. Employment equity legislation is a critical enabler for providing the opportunity of access to employment in South Africa. The crucial questions with which this research is preoccupied are; what discourses are generated at the time of employment and what happens after one is employed? The examination of a subset of 55 interviews, a group discussion, and the employment equity reports of one organization suggest that constructions of merit by most White participants are suspicious of Black competence and favor colorblind notions of fairness and equal opportunity. Most Black participants repudiate such notions of merit as offensive. When merit is itself deconstructed, it is a stable, unchanging, preformed mass, which seeks to uphold the status quo.