Why would you trust any employer’s HR department? Their job is to reduce the company’s liability, not help you with your problems.
This is an HR responsibility. You either trust them to avoid and eliminate discrimination or you don't.
No, HRs responsibility is to make sure that legal liability for unlawful discrimination does not get imposed on the company, consistent with other corporate goals.
Actually mitigating discrimination may sometimes be the mechanism for that. Helping management create a smokescreen around acts of discrimination and find pretexts to force out people likely to discredit that smokescreen are also sometimes ways HR does that.
Mistaking HR for your advocate rather than management’s is a dangerous mistake.
At a minimum, they’d need to stop accepting employee referrals (how can they tell if the referrals biased?) and take over the technical interview process.
Also, what happens when an exec elsewhere in the company discriminates against someone? Will HR have the power to unilaterally fire the exec? The CEO? The chairman of the board? How would they even detect the discrimination?
Sadly, declaring that one division of a company will eliminate discrimination doesn’t work. You need the whole company to pull together, though realistically, that won’t work either.
Society as a whole has to decide to solve the problem. Looping around to the article, one of the political parties passed hundreds of bills to disenfranchise minority voters; arguing that minorities should have basic rights is (in the US, at least) politically controversial.
Charitably, I hope the goal is to force my values on the employees, and silence dissent (no bigoted discussions at work).
Invoke Godwin’s Law, and… Done.
If your goal is to "force my values on the employees, and silence dissent (no bigoted discussions at work)", then go start your own company (although your demands best describe a cult).