Is the purported need for role models as justification for diversity quotas an acceptance of racial essentialism? Is it a fatalistic acceptance that humans are incapable of seeing one another as humans first and foremost? If I have to see somebody who looks like me achieve something to know that I can achieve it, does that perhaps speak to a lack of imagination on my part? Or worse, is it a belief that those who do not look like me are an inherently different type of person, capable of different things, and incapable of others?