I wonder what’s the strongest steel-man rebuttal to the opinions in this article ?

There isn't one. Americans don't know how to reconcile their history of institutional racism with the current liberal understanding of what it means to live in a meritocratic society. This is mostly because Americans refuse to reify and deal with socioeconomic class structures that give certain groups in certain classes various advantages. Race is a red herring, the real distinctions are of socioeconomic class and legacy wealth inherited from racist institutions.

As long as race is used as a stand-in for socioeconomic class nothing will change. The people that benefited from racist policies in the past continue to pass on those advantages to their descendants. This is particularly visible in educational institutions with legacy admissions. Groups that were disadvantaged continue to be disadvantaged because generational wealth is not something that can be "fixed" by re-balancing admissions across racial boundaries because the real problem isn't race but which bracket of the socioeconomic ladder one was born into.