Being white isn't correlated with merit despite what you think.
The point is that here you literally have a mechanism which is explicitly prioritizing traits which have nothing to do with merit. Regardless of whether our other metrics are appropriate, it is by definition clear that with this system you will inevitably dilute competence -
Incidentally this is a source of political bias in academia; you get your way if you can convince a generation or two that that having people with different skin colors working together is somehow going to improve the quality of science that you practice.
Drop this ridiculous rationalization of racism and sexism.
But it isn't racist to suggest that they may be better sports players, right?
Look, none of what I'm saying justifies discrimination against individuals, because we are still dealing with probabilistic distributions. What it does suggest is that inequality of outcome can be explained without resorting to racism and sexism. Further it suggests that our goals of gender and racial parity in industry cannot occur without some penalty to merit, which may be worse for society.
Sure, now go out and prove that that's actually what happened and that the penalty is worse than the benefit of elevating of people who used to have no status to even play the game.