A British classical music organization exposes the sordid business behind all racial-preference regimes.
Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.
The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.
[…]
