When Representation Replaced Competence, Everybody Lost

There is a principle that was once understood, and it went like this: when a Black child sees a Black surgeon, a Black engineer, a Black judge, a Black professor of physics, something happens in the architecture of possibility inside that child’s mind. A wall comes down. A door appears where there was only a wall. The research on this is real and substantial. Thomas Dee of Stanford University demonstrated in 2004 that when Black students are assigned to Black teachers, their test scores improve, their rates of disciplinary action decline, and their likelihood of being recommended for gifted programs increases. This is not sentimentality. It is measured and replicated and it reflects something true about human psychology — that we calibrate our sense of the possible by what we see achieved by people who look like us. Representation matters. That sentence is not in dispute.

What is in dispute — what must be in dispute, if we are honest people who care about outcomes rather than optics — is what happens when representation becomes the primary criterion for selection, displacing competence, experience, demonstrated ability, and measurable results. What happens is documented. What happens is predictable. And what happens is an insult to every Black professional who earned their position through excellence, because the moment the standard shifts from “the best person for the job” to “the best person who looks right for the job,” every Black person in every position is contaminated by the suspicion that they are there not because they are good enough but because they were needed for the photograph.

The Cities Where Representation Won and Results Lost

Baltimore, Maryland has had a Black mayor for 36 of the last 50 years. It has had Black police commissioners, Black school superintendents, Black city council presidents, and Black prosecutors. Representation has been achieved, comprehensively, at every level of municipal governance. The results, measured by every metric that matters to the people who live there, have been catastrophic.

Between 2015 and 2023, Baltimore’s population declined by approximately 35,000 residents — a continuation of a decades-long exodus that has reduced the city from nearly a million people to under 570,000. In 2023, Baltimore’s homicide rate was approximately 52 per 100,000 residents, making it one of the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere. The poverty rate exceeds 20%. The public school system, as documented extensively, produces single-digit math proficiency rates in multiple schools. These are not the statistics of a city that lacks representation. These are the statistics of a city where representation was treated as the objective rather than the means, where the presence of Black faces in positions of authority became the measure of progress rather than the quality of services those authorities delivered.

Chicago under Lori Lightfoot — the first Black woman and first openly gay person to serve as mayor — experienced a surge in violent crime that the city had not seen in decades. In 2021, Chicago recorded 797 homicides, the highest total in 25 years. Carjackings quadrupled between 2019 and 2021. The population declined. Businesses closed. The tourism industry, a major economic engine, contracted. None of this is to say that Lightfoot caused all of these problems — she inherited structural challenges that no single mayor could resolve in one term, and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every American city. But the point is this: her historic demographic profile did nothing to prevent the decline, because demographic profile is not a governing philosophy. It is not a crime reduction strategy. It is not an economic development plan. It is a characteristic of the person holding the office, and it is precisely as relevant to the quality of governance as their height or their favorite color.

The question was never whether a Black person could lead a major American city. Of course they could. The question was whether Blackness alone constituted qualification — and the answer, delivered by data rather than sentiment, is no. Just as whiteness alone never constituted qualification, though the country operated on that assumption for centuries.

The Academic Version

In the university system, the prioritization of demographic representation over scholarly merit has produced consequences that are documented, measurable, and, in certain disciplines, alarming. A 2020 survey by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that over a third of conservative academics in the United States and Canada reported that they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views, and that self-censorship among faculty had increased substantially. When universities hire for demographic representation before scholarly excellence, the incentive structure shifts: the institution rewards conformity to the demographic mandate and punishes deviation from it, and the quality of intellectual output declines accordingly.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard addressed one dimension of this problem, but the deeper issue persists in hiring. When a university department advertises a faculty position and the search committee’s primary mandate is to increase demographic diversity, the candidate pool is filtered first by identity and second by qualification. This does not mean unqualified people are hired — academic hiring at the tenure-track level generally requires a doctorate and a publication record regardless of other criteria — but it means that the most qualified candidate may be passed over for a sufficiently qualified candidate who satisfies the demographic requirement. Over time, across thousands of hiring decisions, this produces a measurable decline in the average quality of new hires, which produces a measurable decline in research output, which produces a measurable decline in institutional prestige, which harms every graduate of that institution, including and especially the minority graduates whose degrees are now worth less because the institution that issued them prioritized optics over excellence.

The Corporate Theater

Following the summer of 2020, American corporations collectively pledged over $50 billion to racial equity initiatives. They hired Chief Diversity Officers at salaries averaging $350,000. They commissioned unconscious bias trainings, established employee resource groups, published diversity reports with charts showing the racial composition of their workforce broken down by level. They did everything except establish measurable success criteria and hold anyone accountable for meeting them.

A 2022 analysis by Bloomberg found that Chief Diversity Officers had the shortest average tenure of any C-suite position — approximately three years — and that the majority of companies that hired CDOs could not point to measurable improvements in minority hiring, retention, or promotion rates during the CDO’s tenure. The position, in most corporate implementations, was not designed to produce results. It was designed to produce the appearance of caring about results, which is a different product entirely, and the market for that product collapsed with remarkable speed. By 2023, CDO hiring had declined by 40%, and companies that had made dramatic public pledges in 2020 were quietly dismantling the programs those pledges had funded.

Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev of Harvard, who have studied corporate diversity programs for decades, have documented a finding that the diversity industry does not want to hear: mandatory diversity training — the most common corporate intervention — has no positive effect on minority hiring or promotion and in some cases produces a backlash that leaves minority employees worse off than before the training began. The programs that actually work — mentoring, targeted recruitment from specific schools, cross-functional task forces with measurable goals — are the programs that treat minority employees as professionals to be developed rather than demographics to be displayed.

The Insult That Masquerades as Respect

There are, at this moment, over 50,000 Black physicians practicing in the United States. There are over 70,000 Black lawyers. There are Black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, Black four-star generals, Black federal judges, Black NASA engineers, Black partners at elite law firms, Black professors of particle physics and neurosurgery and constitutional law. Every single one of them earned their position through years of education, examination, certification, and demonstrated performance. Every single one of them competed against candidates of every demographic and prevailed on merit.

And every single one of them is undermined, subtly but pervasively, every time a hiring decision is made primarily on the basis of race. Because when the standard shifts from “she is the best candidate” to “she is the best Black candidate,” the modifier infects the achievement. It creates, in the minds of colleagues and clients and patients and students, a question that should not exist: is she here because she is excellent, or because she is needed? That question is a form of violence against every Black professional who has ever stood in front of a mirror at four in the morning studying for a board exam that no one gave them a demographic discount on. It delegitimizes their accomplishment not by denying it but by making it ambiguous — and ambiguity, in the domain of professional competence, is a poison that no amount of representation can cure.

When you lower the bar for someone, you have not elevated them. You have told them, and everyone watching, that you did not believe they could clear the bar that was set for everyone else. That is not advocacy. That is condescension with a diversity logo.

Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution scholar, has written about this dynamic with a precision that the representation-industrial complex finds intolerable precisely because it is accurate. The pursuit of diversity, Steele argues, becomes a form of “white guilt” that benefits the institutions practicing it — they get to feel moral — more than the individuals it claims to serve. The Black professional who is hired under a diversity mandate inherits a stigma that the white professional hired on pure merit does not. The institution has purchased its moral credential at the cost of the individual’s professional legitimacy. That is not a trade that any self-respecting person would accept, and the fact that it is offered under the banner of racial justice makes it more offensive, not less.

The Model That Actually Works

The solution is not to abandon the goal of a workforce, a faculty, a government, a profession that reflects the demographic composition of the nation. That goal is legitimate, and the reasons for it — the research on role models, the documented benefits of diverse perspectives in problem-solving, the simple justice of a society in which every talent is developed regardless of its packaging — are well-established. The solution is to pursue that goal through the pipeline rather than the endpoint.

What does this mean in practice? It means investing in the educational infrastructure that produces excellent candidates from every demographic. It means STEM programs in majority-Black high schools. It means scholarship programs that identify talented students early and fund their development through completion. It means mentoring networks that connect Black professionals with Black students. It means internship pipelines that give Black candidates the experience and the credentials that make them not merely competitive but dominant in the hiring process.

It means, in short, building the supply of excellent Black candidates rather than lowering the standard of selection to accommodate the current supply. This is harder. It takes longer. It does not produce the immediate photographic results that a diversity hire produces. But it produces something that a diversity hire cannot: unambiguous achievement. A Black surgeon who graduated at the top of her class from a program that admits on merit alone needs no asterisk next to her name. Her patients do not wonder whether she is qualified. Her colleagues do not question her competence. She stands in a position of authority because she earned it, and the child who sees her sees not a symbol of institutional accommodation but proof of what excellence looks like — and that proof is worth more than a thousand diversity reports.

The Conversation We Must Have

This is the hardest thing to say, and therefore it is the thing that most needs saying: the demand for representation without competence is itself a form of racism. It is the racism of lowered expectations. It is the racism that looks at Black America and concludes, implicitly, that Black professionals cannot compete on equal terms and must therefore be given a separate standard — a standard that is lower, a standard that is easier, a standard that is, beneath its progressive vocabulary, a declaration of inferiority dressed up as inclusion.

Every Black person who has ever been asked “how did you get this position?” in a tone that suggested the answer was demographic rather than meritocratic knows what this system produces. It produces doubt. It produces resentment. It produces a professional environment in which Black excellence is perpetually provisional, perpetually subject to the unspoken question. And the cruelest irony is that the people who created this dynamic — the diversity consultants, the progressive administrators, the corporate equity officers — believe they are helping. They believe the doubt they have manufactured is someone else’s prejudice rather than the predictable consequence of their own policies.

There was a time in this country when Black people were told, explicitly and legally, that they could not have certain positions because of their race. That was hard racism, and it was fought with blood and courage and the moral clarity of people who knew that their cause was just. There is now a time in this country when Black people are told, implicitly and institutionally, that they can have certain positions because of their race — and this soft racism, this racism of accommodation, this racism that smiles and calls itself progressive, is in its own way more corrosive than the old kind, because it cannot be fought without appearing to fight against one’s own interests. The person who says “I don’t want your lowered bar” is called ungrateful. The person who says “judge me by my work, not my face” is called a tool of white supremacy. The person who says “competence has no color” is told that colorblindness is itself a form of racism.

And so the system continues, producing its theater of representation while the outcomes — the crime rates, the graduation rates, the employment numbers, the quality-of-life metrics — continue to tell the truth that the theater was designed to obscure: that looking like the community you serve is meaningless if you cannot serve the community. That representation without results is a photograph of progress pasted over the face of failure. And that the Black community deserves better than symbols — it deserves competence, accountability, and the basic respect of being held to the same standard as everyone else, not because that standard is white, but because that standard is human, and lowering it for anyone is an act not of liberation but of contempt.