I don’t have data on this, but my impression is that elite institutions have been in recent years carrying out a vast social experiment testing the widely accepted Theory of Intersectionality’s contention that of course black women are usually the best choices for top jobs because they are the most discriminated against, so therefore they are the most underemployed relative to their tremendous skills.

For example, by my arithmetic, by early this year, 24% (35 out of 145) of new federal judges appointed by Joe Biden and approved by the Senate have been black women, despite black women comprising well under an order of magnitude fewer LSAT-takers with scores high enough to suggest they would make good federal judges.

Similarly, elite cultural institutions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the leading site for avant-garde performing arts in the United States (e.g., Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach in the 1980s), seem to have been hiring black women at a rapid clip despite few being able to articulate any theory of affinity that would make you think that black women particularly like the kind of thing BAM does.

For example, I was idly glancing at an article about the current troubles of BAM, and sure enough, its president is a black woman named Gina Duncan, who got hired in early 2022 during the Racial Reckoning away from Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, where she got hired right after George Floyd’s death, and her focus was on, surprise, surprise, promoting Diversity.

I went back and read up on the history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was founded before the Civil War. It was in a bad state in 1967, with its Brooklyn neighborhood in urban decline and nobody in Manhattan being all that enthusiastic about taking the subway all the way to Brooklyn. So they hired a Jewish guy named Harvey Lichtenstein, and in 32 years on the job, he did an epic job of making BAM the biggest American brand name in avant-garde performing arts.

Who could have imagined that Jewish guys are sometimes pretty good at producing entertainment?

Does anybody know of a reasonable list of elite cultural institutions (e.g., the Metropolitan Opera of New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis) where I could test my theory of hiring for top jobs?