Pat Buchanan is off his rocker again. In "Unpardonable sin of Larry Summers," he's confusing different aptitudes for different levels of intelligence. Apparently someone who is good at math and science but not so good at English or history, or perhaps your stereotypical geek/nerd who cannot handle social situations is more intelligent than those less skilled at math and science but more skilled in other areas. So apparently your autistic savant is among the most intelligent people out there. He also opens the door to the very thing that the movie "Gatica" depicts, he writes "Can it be that biology is destiny?" While I do not think that he would go so far as "Gatica" does, I think it is incredibly dangerous to be opening the door to allowing society to expect differing levels of ability and achievement for different segments of the population. Rather, I still believe that equality will only ever come when the differences cease to be noticed. I believe that you will not achieve racial harmony while having different races, that it can only come in a color-blind society. Again, I am speaking of ideals, but this time perhaps an obtainable one, for already we see any number of interracial marriages blurring the lines between the races, if we were to require racial blindness in our colleges and applications process, i.e. refuse to allow it to be on the forms, get rid of the quotas and instead simply insist on the most qualified being accepted, I think you'd go farther over time. You might see some stratification, perhaps in part because of the sort of aptitude that Mr. Buchanan refers to, but also because some groups self-discriminate against achieving in a meritocracy. Boundless had an article on this a few years back, "Defending The Race," which has some interesting numbers. For example, "the children of black parents who earn $50,000 a year on average post lower SAT scores than white students whose parents earn just $10,000." This, and other numbers in this article, largely come from Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America by John McWhorter, a Professor of Linguistics at UC, Berkeley. I would suggest you look at the Boundless article at very least before getting on my case too much on this topic.
Returning to my original thrust, while you might see some stratification, the demonstrable existence of a meritocracy would have its own effects, it would tend to undermine the types of self-discrimination that lead to my tangent above. It would tend to allow the exceptional individuals that through hard work or genetic "luck," go beyond the "tendencies" of their race or sex to in fact do so. It would not, of course, be easy to monitor or ensure in practice. Unlike a quota system, which nice easy statistical results that lend themselves to government oversight, a meritocracy is much harder to evaluate and regulate. After all, at times you have equally qualified candidates but can only hire one. At other times the ability to define on paper what constitutes the most qualified candidate can be difficult. Take for example the true story that the movie "The Sixth Happiness" tells, of a lower class English woman determined to be a missionary, and who was in fact a successful one by any meaningful definition. Yet she was unqualified for the position according to the China missionary society. Their rules were too strict to allow for exceptional people, obviously an undesirable situation as well. Where does the balance lay? I am unsure, I just know that quotas and the unreasoning drive for "diversity" is not it.