I think the goal of attempting to reduce in-group bias is laudable. I generally think that any attempt to remove race as a component from any decision making is

I think the goal of attempting to reduce in-group bias is laudable. I generally think that any attempt to remove race as a component from any decision making is a good thing. That being said, I think that if you plot, for example, the black and white American populations for things when it comes to language, interests, economics, education, culture in general, at the population level, these populations diverge pretty dramatically. So if you take a random black person and a random white person and say "go be friends," that is far less likely to be a compatible relationship than if you took two individuals of the same "race." People seem to have problems keeping these thoughts simultaneously. Not being friends with somebody on the basis of their race: bad. Being more likely to be friends with people who happen to share your superficial characteristics because the populations associated with those superficial characteristics happen to be pretty different: fine. As Thomas Sowell has essentially said in virtually every book he's written: it doesn't make sense to take two populations that do not behave the same way and then expect them to produce identical outputs. It doesn't make sense to slap the label of racism on that delta. Attempts to align the circumstances/behaviors etc of different populations, should, in theory, reduce the delta. I think in some cases, it's commendable, and in some cases, it's fundamentally authoritarian and functionally "cultural erasure."