Can you imagine requiring every NBA team to have only 12.2% black players and the rest would be required to be white / latino / asian? And to have the same breakdown on the court during game play?
If there were a contest for the most stupid idea in politics, my choice would be the assumption that people would be evenly distributed in incomes, institutions, occupations or awards, in the absence of somebody doing somebody wrong. Political crusades, bureaucratic empires and lucrative personal careers as grievance mongers have been built on the foundation of that assumption, which is almost never tested against any facts.
Something as simple as age differences among groups can doom any assumption of even outcomes. If every 20-year-old Puerto Rican in the United States had an income identical with the income of every 20-year-old Japanese American — and identical incomes at every other age — Japanese Americans as a group would still have a higher average income than Puerto Ricans in the United States. That is because the median age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older. People with 20 years more work experience usually make higher incomes. And age difference is just one of many differences between groups.
You can study innumerable groups in countries around the world today, or over centuries of recorded history, without finding a single example of the even outcomes that are used as a benchmark for determining discrimination. Nevertheless, courts of law — including the Supreme Court of the United States — use something that has never been found anywhere as a norm to which current realities are to be compared. Billions of dollars, in the aggregate, have changed hands as a result of individual lawsuits charging discrimination.
From Thomas Sowell