When decisions are made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex, you shouldn't be surprised when people wonder if decisions are/were made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex.
The promise of the superficial characteristics came first. Then a solution (a candidate, in this case) was chosen from a limited solution set
When people do things like this, they make it clear they don't want optimal outcomes, with regards to performance and the like. They make it clear that other, superficial, characteristics carry greater weight.
This hurts any functioning society, certainly in the long-term. However, some people want that--for some societies.
Regardless of any "superficial" characteristic (I think many would argue that being Black in America in anything but superficial) what exactly do you think an optimal outcome is when selecting something like a judge? What is a high "performance" judge? Because even though for the first few hundred years of our nation's history, we selected judges only from a very large group of old, white, catholic/protestant men, we sure have come up with plenty of incompetence and corruption.
Should we hire judges based solely on their LSAT score? Or perhaps only judges from the most ivy league, selective law schools? Or maybe we should select for judges who can recite the law by memory?
Judges need to represent the people that they stand in judgement of. You want people that know what it is like to grow up poor or to grow up under racism or whatever. And Black women are severely underrepresented in the federal judiciary.
Of course, any person selected as a judge needs to meet a minimum level of competence (something that has usually been the case up until at least a few selections from the last administration). Regardless, the solution set of Black female attorneys and judges is plenty large to be able to find fully qualified candidates for many, many federal appointments.
eg. on Biden: https://news.yahoo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-biden-promise...
The promise of the superficial characteristics came first. Then a solution (a candidate, in this case) was chosen from a limited solution set
When people do things like this, they make it clear they don't want optimal outcomes, with regards to performance and the like. They make it clear that other, superficial, characteristics carry greater weight.
This hurts any functioning society, certainly in the long-term. However, some people want that--for some societies.