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I do not accede to this consensus.
This is the conclusion pushed by a decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push, the opposite side of an equal decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push proclaiming the strength of diversity and so forth. Neither of the simple stories told by either side is even nuanced and complex enough to be 'true' in an empirical sense.
Has a black woman ever been promoted into a job she's incompetent at? Sure.
Has a white man ever been promoted into a job he's incompetent at? Oh FUCK yes.
We can start that list with 'every person I've ever worked for, and most presidents' and expand it from there.
Like evolution, capitalism is powerful force towards progress in the aggregate, but incredibly dumb and random at the individual level. Meritocracy is a nice idea, but it doesn't actually explain how the economy works beyond a small macro-scale correlation. The rhetorical picture painted that every hiring decision is 100% meritocratic and optimal, such that applying any new pressure on the selection process is necessarily a step away from optimality, is a pipe dream.
Has a black woman ever gotten a diversity nod when they weren't the strongest candidate on paper? Sure.
Would they have actually hired the best candidate on paper, or would they have hired someone that goes to the same yacht club as the CEO, or is tall with a firm handshake? Networking and presentation are very real things in this arena.
And I do actually believe the 'if two runners have the same speed but one has bad form, recruit the one with bad form' argument, and the 'diversity in backgrounds leads to broader problem solving across the team' argument. I expect a properly-calibrated push for diversity to lead to stronger teams.
That may certainly be countered by improperly-calibrated pushes for diversity driving things down, but I'm not convinced the hiring process in general is well-calibrated enough for that to matter, and certainly no one ever offers statistical data showing a national downward trend (or w/e) when making this argument.
It does make it harder to have merit anywhere, though. At least in the US, due to the "disparate impact" standard, it's hard to use any sort of test to measure aptitude without getting sued, which hurts organizations hire qualified people in general. Like, tests being fine but with different standards for different races would be better than the current status, as at least you'd get the more competent people within each group, but that's illegal.
It's also pretty plainly clear to me that everyone wants more of the favored minorities in their organizations, and this obviously has a tradeoff.
Look no farther than what happened at universities before the SCOTUS case last year (and presumably still happens in many places under the radar), for extremely obvious cases of less qualified people academically being chosen. And SATs are pretty predictive of scholastic achievement.
On the other hand, I see no reason to think that people are promoting incompetent or less competent white people at above average rates? Rather the opposite, given the current incentives?
Your "bad form" and "diversity in background" takes are reasonable, but I at least would have some caution in practice for the latter. Diversity is for some reason nearly always taken to mean diversity along the various groups that the left cares about, and not, e.g. religious diversity, even though I would think that different ideological commitments would do more towards seeing things in complimentary lights than different ethnicities.
At the very least, we should stop legally mandating racial preferences in hiring, and let capitalism do its work of directing resources towards those who do a better job, without interference.
I'll end by pointing out that if you do genuninely think that there's currently a non-innate IQ gap, that probably should still affect who you want to employ—jobs that require more intelligence should end up hiring different racial groups at different rates.
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