Why care? That seems pretty obvious: because ethnicity is already used to justify policies of affirmative action, used as a measure of prosperity and equality.

Why care? That seems pretty obvious: because ethnicity is already used to justify policies of affirmative action, used as a measure of prosperity and equality. The common reasoning is that until the conditional probabilities by demographic are flat, there must be systemic oppression which must be rectified by applying concerted pressure in the other direction. This is an a priori assumption that there are no relevant confounding factors that could acceptably create this outcome, and this assumption ought to be unwarranted for anyone who is interested in the truth. It is only appropriate that you examine whether the policies stand a chance of actually reaching the yardstick they are aiming for, or whether that's treating symptoms that really aren't symptoms at all. Furthermore, there are some indicators that this is indeed going badly. For instance, by lowering the admissions criteria for an ethnicity, it creates a (correct!) stereotype that those students are on average less skilled, both among others and also among themselves. In an attempt to address an ill-defined form of supposedly systemic oppression, this policy creates a very concrete and actually systemic mechanism to cause the very thing it claims to oppose, and which has knock-on effects. You see the exact same thing in STEM: anything but a 50/50 representation of gender is an indicator of discrimination. The 'cure' is to roll out the red carpet with biased programs, so that you actually get lower qualified and less interested people working side by side with others who receive no special provisions and worked hard to get there. It's associated with a moral panic that very noticeably makes the relations between the genders worse. The question of 'why are you so interested in race?' reads to me as a form of denial and projection. The policies already treat groups as monolithic entities. White students, or men in tech, are treated as if they are somehow collectively conspiring to benefit each other at the expense of other groups, even though the individuals compete against each other. Anyone who disagrees, even a member of the 'oppressed group', is dismissed out of hand as having internalized their oppression or denying their privilege. This is ironically exactly the kind of bourgeois talking-down we're all supposed to be fixing, and betrays a moral and value judgement that is the exact opposite of "don't treat people differently by race and gender" and "different ability doesn't means you're less of a person". "Why is the answer important?" is the wrong question. It's "why are you turning a mundane question about group averages into a moral judgement on individuals, and blaming others for it?" This is a real problem that is happening today, and it's dismissed out of hand in favor of LARPing against the ghosts of christmas past, because facing the present makes the activists uncomfortable whose policies we've already been following for decades.