Year 1980: “Musical orchestras are too white/male/etc. That’s because everyone else is discriminated against in open auditions. We should have blind auditions.”
Year 2000: Widespread institution of blind auditions, so that musicians are selected only on the quality of their playing.
Year 2020: “Musical orchestras are too white/male/etc. We should abandon blind auditions and select musicians according to preferred race/gender/etc. criteria.”*
So, do we want:
(a) the highest quality musicians, and so to implement selection procedures that lessen/eliminate hiring based on musically irrelevant factors, or
(b) musicians who are proportionally representative of race/gender/etc. demographics, and so to make musical quality secondary or tertiary?
* Anthony Tommasini, “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions.” The New York Times, July 16, 2020.
What do we want?
We???
I think we have located the real problem.