This is a tired debate that won’t be resolved here, but here’s the other perspective anyway:
Suppose you work for a company and your boss is from Country X and you are not. Your boss hired several other people from Country X and regularly socializes with them more than others in the office.
When layoffs come, your boss instinctively advocates for the people he is closest to, which happens to be people who look like him and speak the same native language. “That’s not fair!” you say. “I’m a higher performer than them. This is just favoritism.” Your boss says that he did not take race into account in his decision.
Your company agrees with you and tells your boss that his favoritism is unacceptable. There are now processes in place to flag this kind of situation. Your boss grumbles “well I didn’t take anybody’s race into account before, and now I have to. This is racism!”
Except they do take race into account. Have you never been on a hiring committee for a tech company? There's a just-barely-legal imperative to prioritize all nonwhite/nonasian and nonmale candidates. In some corporations, this goes as far as mandating that an equal number of nonwhite/nonasian candidates as white/asian candidates make it to the final interview round.
What makes you trust someone who says they aren't taking race into account when that same person okayed having objective racial biases baked into the hiring process?
Humans have a known exploit called "lying". It's well-documented being abused in the wild and there are no patches. Keep that in mind whenever someone is telling you something that is in direct contradiction with their actions.
> What makes you trust someone who says they aren't taking race into account when that same person okayed having objective racial biases baked into the hiring process?
To continue the analogy:
Your company is growing again and your boss continues to hire a bunch of people from Country X. HR contacts your boss and tells him that he can’t just keep interviewing/hiring people from his country. Your boss responds that he is hiring the most qualified applicants.
After several months of your boss hiring people from Country X, leadership steps in and says that he must interview people from other countries. He starts interviewing to a wider group of applicants, but funnily enough, he persists in mostly hiring people from Country X. He swears that he is not biased and is only picking the very best candidates.
Leadership steps in again and says “Look, you need to start hiring other people. I don’t care how impartial you claim to be. There is talent all around the world, and narrowly hiring from Country X is becoming a liability to the company. We would like to see at least Y% of your new hires need to come from places other than Country X.”
Your boss contacts the media and files a lawsuit. After all, the company is explicitly, actively discriminating against applicants from Country X, right?
Yes, so long as the boss can prove that the hires from country X were superior to the alternatives for their respective roles. The most competent people deserve the jobs the most, period.
This is hilarious in the context of white-collar work, considering that women absolutely dominate college degree issuance, and have for quite some time now.
Still, there is a shocking shortage of women in highly technical engineering roles. I'm a board member of a local college's Women In Tech group, and have donated a few thousand dollars of my personal money to the group. There are just not as many women as men who are interested.
Suppose you work for a company and your boss is from Country X and you are not. Your boss hired several other people from Country X and regularly socializes with them more than others in the office.
When layoffs come, your boss instinctively advocates for the people he is closest to, which happens to be people who look like him and speak the same native language. “That’s not fair!” you say. “I’m a higher performer than them. This is just favoritism.” Your boss says that he did not take race into account in his decision.
Your company agrees with you and tells your boss that his favoritism is unacceptable. There are now processes in place to flag this kind of situation. Your boss grumbles “well I didn’t take anybody’s race into account before, and now I have to. This is racism!”