@WilyRickWiles
No Wiley... you completely missed the point.
She would NOT be hired.
Because the answer would NOT have been because “yes, because you are black, but also bla bla”...
It would have been simply “No, because you were the best applicant”.

The moment you have to add a non-merit attribute, it is discrimination, whether you think it is justified or not.

And as long as some kind of discrimination is involved, people will always ask why you got the job.
The South African constitution states that racial discrimination is illegal unless it is justified... is if anything, honest. Because affirmative action always implies discrimination based on race or sex.
It is NOT affirmative action if the applicant is the best one.

The red herring you throw in about me thinking “non-whites are less qualified on the whole” is the oldest trick in the book.
No, I do not think that, and it does not matter if I thought that because my original question specifically removed that option for this specific case.

You can clearly see this in countries where discrimination is illegal, even if “justified”, like NZ. I have hired 5 people in 2019/20 financial year, 1 “black”, 2 brown and two white and no one asked why they were hired. They were simple the best applicants.

@Hanno I'm sorry, I misread you as asking whether an equally qualified white person would have been hired, but framing aside, I think my point stands. Basically, I agree that she would have had a lower chance of being hired, but my agreement stops there. That is, I'm saying that if you had a lab that cranked out Black and white journalists in proportion to their share of the population, and you engineered the Black journalists to be more qualified, the Black journalists would still be disproportionately less likely to be hired because of systemic discrimination. Our history in the United States defines one's biases and opportunities. The "catch-22" that you can't combat racism because that would itself be racism is ludicrous.

@WilyRickWiles
Very good. I am trying to explain why there will always be questions why she was hired as long her race was one of the key criteria.

I agree with you that systemic racism did exist in the US and are still occurring some places in the world.

You then propose that NYT and WaPo as well as AP, CNN etc are run by racist white people? Today. Ok.

We should combat racism, and I never stated that you can’t because it would be racist, is another red herring.
Using racist laws (affirmative action) to combat racism is ludicrous.

The cure is labour laws that exclude race as a criteria completely and education that are available to all.