> if you look at say, athletic selection for a sport like basketball or athletics, you'd find that race is inherently a criteria, because certain races seems to have an inherent advantage (or more correctly, certain races seems to have a _disadvantage). But nobody ever says anything in those cases.

I think a charitable explanation for why this is, is sports is pretty much always a voluntary activity, so it's natural to not get as worked up over either implicitly or explicitly favoring a race, compared to, say, doing the same thing in employment or scoring someone's credit, which will almost certainly impact everyone in society involuntarily.