While perhaps not the most professional on the recruiters' part it's hardly racist to half-ass a 'check the checkbox' assignment. Unlike the racist tokenism and just outright disrespectful facade of visiting a school when there is little to no (apparent) interest in hiring from.
It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard you're serving leftovers from another school.
I don't think I really agree that visiting HBCUs is racist tokenism unless it is 100% just to get diversity brownie points and nothing else: it's still better than not visiting them entirely and to provide opportunities to underrepresented minorities for which, while the intent is to put them into the corporate grinder, having a high-paying tech job is still a material benefit.
> It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard ...
Without seeing how they treated students at a similarly ranked non-HBCU, it's difficult to distinguish racism from colorblind elitism. It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism, but without a comparably ranked school for comparison, I wouldn't be comfortable using the word "definitely".
Ok. If you are going to agree that the situation is almost certainly the result of at least implicit racism, and the alternatives are pretty unlikely then cool. You agree.
The second sentence of my post begins "It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism." I was careful to point that out before pointing out that it's jumping to conclusions to use the word "definitely".
While perhaps not the most professional on the recruiters' part it's hardly racist to half-ass a 'check the checkbox' assignment.
This is exactly why you can't reasonably accept treating one group of people differently - it might be a lazy recruiter half-ass'ing their job, but it might also be actual real racism. There's no way to tell by looking. The outcome is the same.
If you're willing to give them a pass you might just be enabling a racist.
A. What you'll have to do will depend in how finely you divide your population. E.g. recent african immigrant vs. Slave descended are quite different demographics with different life trajectories and you'll be able to tell one from another very easily.
There will be huge political fights over these categories.
B. If you do hire based on population demographics then two things will happen: You'll get a bit more inefficient workplace due to unperforming workers. But more importantly, you'll be surrounding people with a bunch of Xers (whichever the underperfoming demographics is. Hillbillies? African Americans? Republicans? Left handed folk?) who are underperforming. This will cause a strong association in their mind that X=less capable. Xism will then increase.
The influx of women to my workplace really didn't help my colleague's sexism.
