Humanity does better when we don't marginalise people for dumb reasons such as membership in a visible minority group. Marginalising someone for a dumb reason is an individual decision, and it's a decision that a professor is frequently in a position to make.
Arguably the higher-leverage parts of a professor's job are teaching classroomfuls students at once, advising graduate students, and "service," meaning things like sitting on committees within the university, attending and sometimes organising conferences, and so forth. These all involve the professor spending time to help others' careers. Owing to their leverage, it's especially important that these aspects are done well. And since candidates for tenure-track jobs generally haven't been in such a position of leverage before, it's especially important to screen for suitability for teaching and service when hiring tenure-track professors.
I'm sure you can polish this, and I'm sure there are other arguments in the same direction.
Regarding specialisation, I gave an example of a world-class researcher who also does outreach to an underrepresented group in the post you replied to.
Moreover, the research, teaching, and service parts of a professor's job aren't as separable as you'd hope---the overarching purpose of it all is to keep a field of academic inquiry alive, where research, teaching, advising, and service all operate at different time scales. The field of a group of researchers who don't teach or advise students dies when they all die. A hypothetical teacher who isn't involved in research can't bring students near research-level work.
I think there is a pretty big jump between expecting a professor to treat all their students equally and with respect regardless of their gender/race/religion/etc and expecting them to to teach underprivleged children in foreign countries.
Everyone (well at least everyone reasonable) agrees with the former. The latter on the other hand feels like a totally different set of skills than what a professor does, and it feels unfair to expect that out of someone who doesn't have the inclination to do that (or to bring it in terms suitable to the HN crowd, the same way it is toxic when companies push good engineers into management against their will or as a requirement in order to advance)
Humanity does better when we don't marginalise people for dumb reasons such as membership in a visible minority group. Marginalising someone for a dumb reason is an individual decision, and it's a decision that a professor is frequently in a position to make.
Arguably the higher-leverage parts of a professor's job are teaching classroomfuls students at once, advising graduate students, and "service," meaning things like sitting on committees within the university, attending and sometimes organising conferences, and so forth. These all involve the professor spending time to help others' careers. Owing to their leverage, it's especially important that these aspects are done well. And since candidates for tenure-track jobs generally haven't been in such a position of leverage before, it's especially important to screen for suitability for teaching and service when hiring tenure-track professors.
I'm sure you can polish this, and I'm sure there are other arguments in the same direction.
Regarding specialisation, I gave an example of a world-class researcher who also does outreach to an underrepresented group in the post you replied to.
Moreover, the research, teaching, and service parts of a professor's job aren't as separable as you'd hope---the overarching purpose of it all is to keep a field of academic inquiry alive, where research, teaching, advising, and service all operate at different time scales. The field of a group of researchers who don't teach or advise students dies when they all die. A hypothetical teacher who isn't involved in research can't bring students near research-level work.