It may sound crazy but I’ve seen something similar happen at a startup I used to work at. The founders (Muslim) very clearly preferred to hire people of similar backgrounds. All their recruiting efforts were focused on Muslims and they went so far as to hire clearly incompetent developers over much more qualified applicants simply because they were Muslim. I’m talking about hiring someone fresh out of school vs someone with years of experience simply because the new grad was Muslim. One guy on my team dared to speak up about it and was accused of being racist. He had to do cultural sensitivity training as a result.