About fifteen years ago, just about the time that the PC sh#t was starting to hit the fan, I began doing some part-time work as an arbitrator for the NY Stock Exchange. In addition to mediating disputes between brokers and their clients, arbitrators also are called upon to settle cases between member firms and their employees.
New arbitrators had to take a few seminars to further our understanding of these employment cases. One hot topic involved discrimination. There were two ways to "prove" it--direct and indirect. I had no problem with the former. It manifests itself when a minority person (i.e., a Black, Hispanic, or a woman) with a clearly superior record of accomplishment is overlooked for a promotion which is then given to a less deserving White Male. Although often difficult to prove, the concept is understandable.
The indirect method of "proving" prejudice is by throwing statistics at you. That is, if Blacks make up 12% of the general population and only 2% of the law partners, bias is assumed. I had a great deal of difficulty with that concept. I argued with the "instructor" vehemently that aptitude and interest might discourage Blacks from being concert violinists and Whites from being NBA point guards, and absent the overt type of biased behavior previously mentioned, one could not assume that just because the numbers worked out in a particular manner, that improper discrimination was the reason.
I kept my mouth shut long enough to get my little diploma and I did work as an arbitrator for several years. Luckily (for the plaintiff), I never was involved in a statistics-based discrimination suit.
Interesting that you should mention that it all started about 15 years ago. That is exactly correct. During the 1980s, SCOTUS had actually managed to strike down some - not all - of the racial preferences that were initiated by the government via an administrative ruling by a bureaucratic parasite named Alfred Blumrosen in the Nixon regime under the Orwellian term "affirmative action", chiefly in the private sector. In order to bring a civil rights suit, the plaintiff actually had to prove they were discriminated against. What a concept!
This was turned on its head by the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Passed by by a Rat-controlled congress with the help of plenty of the plaid-pants platoon (RINOs), and signed into law (in violation of a campaign promise) by the ultimate empty suit, George Herbert Walker Bush. Since then, all the plaintiffs have to do is prove that there are fewer minorities proportionally in any given position than there are in the general population. This now constitutes proof of institutional discrimination. Basically, there is no defense against such a charge as it basically requires defendants to prove their innocence. (Minority-owned firms are exempt, naturally.)
The 1991 law was backed by several large corporate interests at the time, which was seemingly illogical. It's not illogical when you think about a large corporation's greatest fear - some small startup that can run rings around their bloated bureaucracies and seriously eat into their market share. The big players can afford all of the racial/gender preference employee deadwood and hire folks in Bangalore to do the real work. The small startups can't afford the "diversity" quotas-that-are-never-called-quotas, and medium-sized firms must get with the program or face Jesse and the ambulance-chasers, a losing proposition. With it's long record of profiting form slave and sweatshop labor in totalitarian China, I'm surpised it took Wal-Mart this long to get in on the "diversity" racket.
Frankly, any American official has a lot of gall criticizing other countries for their lack of free markets. We're well on our way to becoming a totalitarian oligarchy like China.