This seems like such a facile argument. It seems very difficult to combat racism (ie. the common strand of thought in society that sees people only as a member of their racial group) if you can't consider race at all.
How, for instance, could we even make racial discrimination illegal if the state were entirely forbidden from considering the race of its citizens at all?
How do you propose governing people without somehow grouping them?
It feels like the slippery slope that data aggregators go down. The tension between specificity and parsimony. False positives vs false negatives. Okay so no Nigerian children of privilege. But what about Rwandan children of privilege who were refugees after genocide? So to fix this problem, _more_ grouping seems inevitable, but that's the slippery slope. How much invasion into and quantification of peoples' personal lives can we tolerate in the interest of enforcing equality? I don't think these problems have an easy answer, and "not grouping" doesn't really seem like an option either.
My personal take is just to use socioeconomic background (class) as the main factor. But race, gender, and other identifying factors inevitably play a role. There are some special historical traumas, like slavery, that I do think admit special consideration when we define "equal opportunity," even today.
Is it well meaning? The behaviour of the advocates for these sorts of policies fits vastly closer to
* Want to dehumanise people by seeing them only as a member of their respective groups
* Want an excuse to hate on a particular group of people
* Constructed a story where doing that makes them the good guys
than
* looked at the problems people have
* tried to understand them
* tried to come up with a solution which would improve things