Here’s a highly splashed long article in the Washington Post news section investigating the burning problem that one of the three branches of the military that employ fighter pilots (the Army does not) is—and you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn this—in third place in terms of share of fighter pilots who are black:

Behind closed doors, Marines struggle with a glaring diversity problem

The number of Black Marines who fly fighter jets has fallen. Critics say the service appears unwilling to take aggressive steps that could level the playing field.

By Hope Hodge Seck
October 16, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. EDT

… The Marine Corps, in step with the rest of the U.S. military, has spent decades making a concerted push to become more reflective of the diverse nation it defends. Officials point to sustained gains in recruiting women to join the force and in growing overall diversity among the service’s officer ranks.

But within its community of fighter pilots, these efforts have failed to keep pace. …

How dare any branch of the military be in last place on any DIE metric?!?

Over the past quarter-century, the number of Black Marines who fly fighter jets has fallen from an all-time high of 15 in 2000 to just the five today — not even 1 percent of the approximately 580 fighter pilots serving across the Marine Corps.

So, on average, there have been around 10 Marine fighter pilots. Now there are 5. Proof of worsening systemic racism? Or potential randomness?

It’s the military’s worst such disparity—and one made more striking by the rise of Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a fighter pilot and African American, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff holds the military’s highest post.

After the successful Gulf War of 1991, it was pointed out that 7% of U.S. Army generals were black. Sociologists Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote a 1997 book All That We Can Be: Black Leadership And Racial Integration The Army Way. One lesson I took from it was that a high proportion of serious and ambitious black military talent, both officer and NCO, went into the Army for the usual reasons that a critical mass is a good thing for the people involved.

As far as I could tell, however, everybody of any influence drew the opposite lesson: if the Army could attract a high percentage of all black military talent, then so could the Navy, Air Force, and Marines!

Perhaps what’s going on is less that the Marines are failing black fighter pilots, but that black guys with high potential to be fighter pilots (typically, sons of pilots—the military is now, and usually has been, highly hereditary—so upcoming fighter pilots tend to be plugged into military gossip) are more excited about some other branch. Maybe General Brown’s career has made the Air Force the fashionable branch with black kids whose dads are military officers? Or maybe Brown’s career was helped by the Air Force already attracting a critical mass of black pilot talent? Who knows?

Imagine a black kid in high school, a good student, 680 Math SAT, who grew up on Army bases around the world because his dad is a cargo plane pilot for the Army. His mom’s brother is an avionics technician. He got his private pilot’s license two years ago. He loves flying and he’s good at it. He wants to go to a military academy and the academies want him. People like him and want him to succeed.

He wants to be a fighter pilot, so his dad’s West Point is not in the running because they don’t have fighter planes. He could go to the Naval Academy for either Navy or Marine pilot training or to the Air Force Academy.

How does he choose? Well, I’m guessing, he and his dad and his uncle talk to a lot of military men, especially to black officers. Most of the officers pitch their own service, and, as it turns out, one of the three branches with fighter planes seems to have the most black fighter pilots taking his calls. The Marines seem to have the fewest, so they fall out of the running.

Just before decision day, perhaps, he gets a five minute phone call on Sunday from the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pitching him on the Air Force Academy. (As a favor to his friend, the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, the Chairman has booked an hour in his busy schedule to call the dozen black kids with fighter pilot potential that Colorado Springs and Annapolis are battling over. Yeah, the Chairman knows he should now be impartial, but he loves the Air Force, so he’s doing this off hours.)

The kid is wowed. America’s top military man called him! Colorado Springs, here he comes!

Lots of things work like this with strength building upon strength. In general, it’s a good thing. But the Diversity Inclusion Equity mindset knows nothing of such matters.

Instead, the essence of the conventional wisdom in all these articles about some institution not being up to snuff in employing enough blacks in elite jobs is that to most influential people in 2023, it is inconceivable that black talent is finite. If it is not infinite, that’s only because Society (by which they mean whites) isn’t trying hard enough.