There's a distinction between "It stands to reason that, if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it, and we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner, which will necessarily cause unqualified people who have benefited from racial biases to leave" (which is a claim I have heard "Gebru's crowd on Twitter" make) and "We should re-evaluate people in a non-race-neutral manner and cause people to leave because of their race, regardless of qualification" (which is not).

But making that distinction requires some critical reasoning skills.

In particular, I imagine there's a large crowd of people who are in the group that would be negatively affected by the first proposal trying to paint it as the second - possibly people who have convinced themselves that they have their job due to their genuine qualification, and if they lose it, it is because they were evaluated in a non-race-neutral manner. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

> "we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner"

Cough, no. This is where I know that's not even a rough paraphrasing because racially-neutral or sex-neutral hiring practices are not okay these days. They lead to a meritocracy and that's also not okay. That's how we got where we are. In fact, in hiring now resumes more often have pictures and HR tells us that people are intersectional and to try to hire them. They try to be subtle but they fail. (They don't tell us what intersections.) All interviewers are given the racial statistics and we're told that it's a very serious company priority.

> if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it

This only stands to reason if the company had racially-biased hiring policies.

Instead big SV companies seem to reflect the later years of tech fields in school. And if we look at sex, not race, we can see that the gender-equality paradox from scandinavian schools suggests that not all groups may be equally interested in all things. Perhaps this is society telling those groups not to be, or natural consequences of their upbringing in different areas and circumstances.

We should definitely try to stamp out any racism we find, but let's not cry wolf and label everything racist. Let's actually try to make sure first.