It is, after all, logically impossible for every company to hire the best candidate on the same scale. If you interview people by general aptitude, one company (with the best salary etc.) will get the top folks and everyone else will settle. (It also makes independent interviewing rather useless: each company may as well outsource the job to a single service provider who's good at interviewing and returns a scalar.)
So, the effective way to interview, if you happen not to be a monopoly in your field, is to find candidates who are better for your company.
Some companies believe diversity of skin color actually matters and demonstrates a serious commitment to avoiding groupthink. Some companies believe they should not be caring about skin color at all. You're looking for a company in the latter group, and they're looking for you.
If you give a poor answer to this question, as posed by a company in the first group, it serves the purpose of interviewing - it accurately determines that both you and the company will be unhappy with you being hired at that company.
This statement is based on the racist assumption that skin color makes you think differently. A middle class Asian person who went to college at Stanford is going to think identically to a white middle class person who went to college. A white person who grew up dirt poor and self taught online is going to be vastly different from either.
Skin color doesn't make you think differently, but it (and, even moreso, racial identity, which is different than skin color) does correlate with things beyond socioeconomic class and personal level of education that do.
> A middle class Asian person who went to college at Stanford is going to think identically to a white middle class person who went to college.
It's possible, because the range of variation overlaps considerably, but, overall, no, major subcultural and lived-experience differences in the US don't reduce to economic class and whether (or even where) you went to college.
I thought this was true for a while but I've worked with enough asians (who are also born in USA - some even with their parents being American too) to realize this just isn't true. The white/asian experience has a very different parental/family background. A lot of kids learning some other language from an early age even if their parents weren't born in that country the language is known for.
Most white kids don't go through a lot of that stuff. I used to think "Ah, hello, my fellow American!" And then I realized many asians didn't align with the American identity - at least in SV. Many felt like they were very closely tied (or closer) to their parents or grandparents homeland. Super weird - imo...
Perhaps you are not losing out on perspectives and experiences, per se, but perhaps the biased person running your initial phone screens is causing you to lose out on good candidates who are from a race they don't like, i.e., you're limiting the number of candidates of this perspective and experience that you're willing to interview. That would be a problem worth being aware of! Completely ignoring race means you don't have the data. It doesn't prevent the problem from happening.
(See also, "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.*)
I think it rather is based on the assumption that you are likely to have been treated differently in your life as a result, and thus have different lived experiences that can influence your work.
The best combination for being hired by these companies is having a diverse skin color and being committed to the groupthink.
The second best combination is having a non-diverse skin color and being committed to the groupthink.