Disparate Impact Law is Destroying America

It's a Civilization Killer

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In the wake of last week’s article on race communism and the recent MIT report on continual Chat GPT use making users dumber,¹ I was speaking with a friend of the publication—one who also is a paid subscriber—about the dire state of America’s human capital and why it is so hard for large organiztions to cultivate it. The question was, essentially, “Why is there an AI-adjacent human capital and competence crisis² if schools could just return to relatively cheating-proof forms of testing like blue books?”

The answer, as I spoke about with Jeremy Carl a few months ago,³ is the Civil Rights Act. Particularly, the problem at the root of it all is the surprisingly unknown concept of “disparate impact.” That legal concept is America’s version of race communism, and it is an absolute civilization killer. Particularly, it is an existential problem because there is no way around its consequences once the illogic of it becomes embedded as an untouchable societal truth.

What is Disparate Impact?

Imagine you’re a power utility and in need of hiring a few dozen employees. What you do is relatively specialized, so you can’t test prospective entry-level employees for the job itself. However, you also can’t just hire random people off the street and hope for the best, as a power utility is a very complex system. Any employee needs to meet a minimum threshold of intelligence and problem-solving ability to be anything other than a disaster.

So, what do you do to screen the potential wheat from the certain chaff in the early stages of the hiring process?

Such is the situation Duke Power faced in the 1960s. As a massive power utility, it needed to hire many smart employees and to do so efficiently. To solve that issue, it required prospective employees to either have a high school diploma or achieve a standardized IQ test score equal to the average high school graduate’s IQ score.

That seems like a reasonable decision: without discriminating against anyone for reasons other than intelligence, it could at least narrow applications down to a reasonable pool of prospects from which to choose. Unfortunately for the executives at Duke Power, it was after the 1964 Civil Rights Act that they tried implementing such a sane and fair policy.

So, a black employee sued, arguing that the IQ testing or diploma requirement was illegal because it disqualified blacks at a substantially higher rate than whites. For the reasons articulated by Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, such an outcome was bound to be the case even in the total absence of discriminatory intent, as was the case with Duke Power’s across-the-board requirement.

Because the testing/diploma requirement led to differences in outcome between racial groups, as is the case with essentially any intelligence test, the Supreme Court found in its Griggs v. Duke Power ruling that it was illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which “proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” The court found that while testing can be legal in certain circumstances, “What Congress has commanded is that any tests used must measure the person for the job and not the person in the abstract.”

In other words, the test can’t be what Duke Power’s test was: a fair, unbiased separator of wheat from chaff. Instead, it had to be job-specific and shown to directly relate to the specific job at hand, which is all but impossible with most jobs. The result of the test was that essentially any sort of screening for employment not only became illegal, but also a basis for significant liability under the Civil Rights Act.

This was despite the fact that, as Jeremy Carl notes in The Unprotected Class,⁴ “Senate floor managers explicitly committed that their legislation would not stop employment tests” of the sort at issue in Griggs v. Duke Power. In order to avoid shredding its legitimacy upon such a disastrous shoal, the Supreme Court backtracked from the Griggs ruling in Wards Cove Packing Company v. Antonio.

In that case, the court’s majority found that so long as a “business justification” of the test could be articulated, an employment test was legal. Further, the burden of proof was reversed, with SCOTUS making it the plaintiff’s burden to show that no such justification existed. Thus, employment tests with discriminatory intent remained illegal, but fair tests that inadvertently led to discrimination, as effectively all tests do, became legal again. Though still a limitation on freedom of association, that was at least a workable legal regime.

Then, HW Bush betrayed America on an issue even more important than his false “read my lips: no new taxes” pledge. Instead of abiding by the 1989 Wards decision, he struck a deal with Democrats in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Amongst other things, that onerous law made it easier for supposedly discriminated against prospective employees to prove that employers engaged in disparate impact discrimination.

To do so, it once again reversed the burden of proof and foisted it on employers, requiring them to show that there was a “business necessity” behind the test. If they could not prove their innocence and the fact that the test was not discriminatory, the reverse of the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra in American law, then the employee’s suit would succeed.

There was still one limitation on that. Bush’s law provided that "The mere existence of a statistical imbalance in an employer's workforce on account of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin is not alone sufficient to establish a prima facie case of disparate impact violation." However, it still essentially made employment testing illegal, as the employer had to show a business necessity for the test at hand to be legal. As that is often impossible in mere screening tests of the sort Duke Power wanted to implement, the law de facto barred the use of IQ tests or similar requirements.

The Present State of Disparate Impact

While this would be bad enough if limited to employment law, it has dramatically expanded beyond that point and now extends to essentially every facet of life. Everything from home rentals to hiring and promotion to school discipline is under the thumb of disparate impact law. Such is what even Trump’s DOJ currently provides, saying, “As the Supreme Court has explained, even benignly-motivated policies that appear neutral on their face may be traceable to the nation’s long history of invidious race discrimination in employment, education, housing, and many other areas.”⁵

Such has long been the case, as disparate impact law quickly grew from being a feature of employment law into a behemoth that strangles every facet of life in which differences in capacity between different groups become noticeable. As Carl notes in The Unprotected Class:⁶

It was ultimately up to the party in question to prove a business necessity or similar compelling interest in using the test. Until then, they were guilty until proven innocent. Today, disparate impact theory affects not just employment law, but housing policy, education, and criminal background and credit checks, discriminating against whites in almost every instance.

While the problem’s tendrils are present in every area of life, employment remains the area most impacted by it so I will start there.

Under the current state of civil rights law in America, is essentially impossible for employers to hire and promote whites, particularly white men, if any minority applicant is even close to being competent enough for the job.

This is particularly true of companies that need to hire a great many employees and are desirable places to work, as even a whiff of “discriminatory” outcome can lead to painful legal liability. As companies wish to avoid that, they do so by refusing to hire white men insofar as they are able to do so and remain semi-functional as a business entity. As Carl notes:⁷

Disparate impact has been used exhaustively to deprive whites of jobs they would have otherwise earned. Much of this happens not overtly, but due to the ubiquitous looming threat of a disparate impact lawsuit. Companies simply won't try to implement policies that might inadvertently give an advantage to whites, even if there is a compelling non-racial rationale for their use. Most companies, above all, loathe legal risk. The internet is filled with websites advising employers on how to avoid unintentional disparate impact in their employment practices.

Further, the mere fact that the law exists at all means that even those organizations of any sort, from schools to companies, that try to follow the law to the letter find it near impossible to fully comply. They are guilty until proven innocent and face a nearly impossible test for proving their innocence if natural differences in outcome shine through. That, in turn, means the Deep State-occupied Department of Justice can follow Beria’s “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” dictum to punish political enemies of the regime. Carl, noting as much, provides:⁸

Disparate impact is how the state enforces anti-white discrimination, as Gail Heriot, a politically independent member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, noted in an article, "Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Virtually Everything Presumptively Illegal." As a result, companies and other private entities are essentially at the mercy of the whims of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, an institution that is politically liberal under Republican presidents and politically radical under Democratic presidents (since virtually all career attorneys in the division are on the Left to Far Left).

In practice, this means that any organization that wishes to avoid DOJ lawfare can only do so by outright and continual discrimination against white men. Meanwhile, they must also let various moochers and looters get away with a host of abuses.⁹

For example, a black woman was fired from Equinox for being late to work nearly 50 times; she sued in a disparate impact case, arguing it was racist to expect her to show up on time, and won over $11 million.¹⁰ Under the present state of US law, the only legal solution would have been to let her not show up to work and force some white guy employed by the gym to pick up her slack. Anything else, from not hiring her to firing her after she showed up late again, would have been just as illegal under disparate impact law as what the gym did.

Countless such examples of that are legally required to happen under current US law. For, under the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 and the rulings and later legislation that have given it its present form, only outcomes discriminatory against “protected classes” are prosecuted by the DOJ. Even the Trump DOJ notes that “Title VI regulations validly prohibit practices having a discriminatory effect on protected groups, even if the actions or practices are not intentionally discriminatory.”¹¹

So, it is legal to discriminate against white Americans, particularly white men. Meanwhile, it remains illegal to discriminate against anyone else. Hence outcomes like the one below, which was found by Bloomberg:¹²

But that is just employment. This is true of everything else as well. University admissions, of course, discriminate against whites (once again, most strongly against white men). Further, that has shown no signs of abating under Trump. Rather, universities are remaining intransigent and are refusing to back off from DEI.¹³

So, instead of admitting qualified whites and Asians, they continue admitting unqualified blacks and Hispanics. For example, a black applicant in the 5th decile, or middle of the pack, is more likely to be admitted to Harvard than a white in the 10th decile, or top 10%:

Admissions to Harvard by race and academic performance. From: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-action-case-showed-astonishing-racial-gaps/

Similarly, this applies to matters of discipline in schools. We keep hearing about “teens” (black thugs) beating and even killing white teenagers as a matter of course. Jonathan Lewis, for example, was a white teenager who was murdered by a gang of known black “bullies” in the school who beat him to death, and the judge in the case gave them a slap on the wrist.¹⁴

But if the gang of thugs was known as a gang of bullies, why wasn’t it ever stopped? Because disparate impact law makes it essentially illegal to enforce discipline in diverse schools. As Carl notes:

Attempts to reduce the numbers of suspensions of African Americans (in particular) and Hispanics, who are suspended at far higher ratios than white students, lead to racially unjust policies because these suspensions are invariably a result of different disciplinary offense rates by race. (Asian-American students are suspended at even lower rates than whites but also make up a much lower percentage of students, and thus for this and other political reasons tend to be less a part of the conversation around school discipline.)

Federal bureaucrats, however, are on a mission to make suspension numbers by race equal in the name of "equity," though the behaviors of these groups are different. Thus, white students, and disproportionately white teachers, are put at substantial risk.

…

The Obama administration went out of its way to emphasize the importance of disparate impact in school discipline. Because they effectively threatened schools' funding if students were disciplined at substantially different rates than their race's share of the population (ignoring the fact that some groups have objectively worse behavior in schools), white and Asian students became victims of violence in schools at increasing rates. Just as in the adult world, not punishing students who engage in violent and even criminal behavior makes life more dangerous for everyone.

…

Ultimately, the Obama administration pushed policies that disproportionately put white students and teachers at risk in order to hide facts about the disciplinary records of black and Hispanic students, because Democrats were uncomfortable with the underlying demographics of school misbehavior. These policies put pressure on schools to not discipline kids like Trayvon Martin and Nikolas Cruz, who would reasonably have been expected to have a criminal record had policies been enforced in a race-neutral fashion. They led to not just numerous traumatized students at schools who were the victims of predators, but in some tragic cases, to dead bodies.

So, when you see those videos out of “diverse” schools showing a feral mob beating some poor white girl half to death, or perhaps some boy like Jonathan Lewis actually to death because he stood up for a friend from whom they stole, know that the assault and/or murder caught on tape is DOJ policy. Any school that didn’t let it happen would face an avalanche of lawsuits and potential criminal referrals. And so the predations continue unabated, though Trump is at least trying to correct this specific issue and the disparate impact issue generally with multiple executive orders.¹⁵

I could go on and on. There are countless examples of disparate impact at work, and they are all rage-inducing. But, hopefully, the present reality of disparate impact law is clear: it is illegal to do anything other than discriminate against whites for the benefit of non-whites, in every area of life from admissions and employment to promotions and discipline.

A Civilization Killer

It is said that if even a tiny black hole, perhaps the size of a coin, were to hit Earth, it would crash straight through it and exit on the other side untouched while causing catastrophic chaos on Earth, from seismic activity to volcanic eruptions.¹⁶ In short, there would be catastrophic damage entirely out of proportion to its size.

The same is true of disparate impact law. A few lines of federal code, a few Supreme Court rulings here and there, a buffoon of a president…and now it is illegal to do anything efficiently and on a grand scale in America. Civilization, in fact, is on the rocks. As Palladium Mag noted in a must-read article titled “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis”:¹⁷

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

The problem is that, unless the disparate impact rules are done away with, there’s no way to correct the issues stemming from them. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle in which every issue caused by a diverse individual weakens the institution, which then can’t correct that issue without running afoul of disparate impact law, and so dives deeper into trying to comply with it in an attempt to give itself breathing room.

And so it creates more problems that then lead to more of the same. It’s as if the ouroboros snake¹⁸ eating its own tail was a hydra that grew a dozen more heads and tails every time it completed a cycle.

Take how employers responded to Griggs and, later, HW Bush’s Civil Rights Act of ‘91: they started requiring college degrees,¹⁹ as those degrees then meant something and could be used in place of IQ tests or similar matters. But colleges then started having to comply with disparate impact law, which made degrees useless as a requirement (though still used by many employers). At the same time, it increased student demand for college and thus drove up prices, which put more students in debt. Meanwhile, those students are propagandized to while in the university system and so accept the priors that led to disparate impact law in the first place. That, in turn, makes it harder to root out of the system at all.

So whereas you used to just have either high-school grads or smart dropouts able to get a stable job at a power utility without incurring any debt, the Griggs decision means:

• Those who want such a job have to go deeply in debt to do it, and disparate impact rules surrounding mortgages and credit checks mean that they are not only worse off because they’re indebted, but are at the not-so-tender mercy of more disparate impact rules and their consequences

• Meanwhile, they’ve likely been indoctrinated into leftism (or at least some of its priors) while in the university system, and so are unwilling to challenge disparate impact law or what led to it, further enshrining the system

• Universities become less useful to attendees as the smart, normal people are screened out in favor of the disparate impact beneficiaries, harming research programs and employers

• Employers are unable to use employment tests, and the alternative (college degrees) has been destroyed by the same process that made employment tests illegal

• With employers struggling to hire the right people, corporations have a harder time growing or becoming more profitable, and at the same time have more HR-related issues that further burden competent employees with bureaucratic regulations. Even with that, the new employees (most of whom are leftist college grads) are more likely to sue over something disparate impact related, further driving down profitability and increasing the need for HR.

• The lack of profitability and need for bureaucracy means fewer competent people are hired, if they even managed to get into college, and everyone suffers from their absence unless they manage to do something pro-social and entrepreneurial. Everything from fewer corporate tech advances to increasing issues with the viability of the large-cap equities on which those who aim to retire rely for much of their retirement savings results from this

• Nothing and no one gets more competent, and disparate impact laws surrounding even things like voting fraud,²⁰ when paired with the college-indoctrinated population (and their jobs in the managerial class, court system, etc.), make the present nearly impossible to escape.

• Those who would have gotten a job at Duke Power right out of high school in 1969 now have to spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to get that same job, if they can get it at all. Meanwhile, the country collapses around them.

All of that could have just been avoided by the Supreme Court not destroying America with Griggs, or HW Bush growing a spine and not further foisting it on America with the CRA of ‘91. Instead, we got that act and ruling, and so all of the above consequences.

As a result, further consequences of that then explode in an ever-expanding cycle of civilizational destruction, much like a Civil Rights Law Kessler Syndrome. Thus, everything gets much worse for self-reinforcing reasons that continue expanding as each one reaches its inevitable conclusion.

In short, we are in a competence crisis that can’t be gotten out of for the same reasons that we are in it to begin with. That is, we are stuck in the present unless there is some civilization-scale step change of the sort seen when the Indo-Europeans, as represented in mythology by Perseus, slew the priestess matriarchy represented by Medusa.²¹ Or when Europeans invented the repeater and anti-malarial drugs, and were able to conquer the world.

The natural, civilization-ending consequences of disparate impact and its discontents can already be seen, outside of the aforementioned examples.

For example, semiconductors are the bedrock of modern civilization.²² Life without them would be akin to having a broken back while traversing the Serengeti alone. Yet, as seen with the disaster that was Biden’s CHIPS Act, the diversity regulations make it legally impossible to produce them in America.²³

The CHIPS Act obliges contractors to hire black female construction workers. It forced semiconductor fabs that cannot function with any margin of error to hire “justice-involved individuals.” It required chipmakers to work with minority contractors to “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.” Many other similar regulations were imposed as well, and all in all, they meant the bill was a flop in even drawing subsidized factories here.²⁴

But even if something miraculously got built, Griggs-style disparate impact law means those fabs that come into existence are legally forbidden from hiring competent employees and screening out incompetent ones, and so they’ll be failures. A civilization can’t function with such rules.

That, at scale, is our problem.

You can’t have a semiconductor fab with 99 normal employees and one George Floyd-style “justice-involved individual” melting down and causing chaos. The nature of semiconductors means there is no room for mistakes.

Similarly, you can’t have a nuclear reactor complex if most of the employees have race communism-related sinecures brought about by disparate impact. That’s how you get Chernobyl.

Nor can deep-sea oil rigs, huge natural gas turbines producing electricity, high-speed aircraft, trans-oceanic internet cables, or any of the rest of the high-tech miracles of modernity we rely upon daily function with a critical mass of DEI commissars hired for disparate impact reasons.

That’s not to say there aren’t talented people who benefit from disparate impact. With populations in the tens of millions, even the tail end of a bell curve has a great many people. But there are not enough to make modernity run. There are not enough to get to Mars…or even to London from Atlanta. To do so reliably requires a well-oiled machinery of people there for reasons of merit, on a scale that makes few companies small enough to avoid the Civil Rights Act (14 or fewer employees) relevant.

Increasingly, that is something we don’t have. It is why the water in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi is undrinkable. It is why the power in California is unreliable. It is why flight schedules with all the major airlines are utterly unreliable and increasingly dangerous.

Disparate impact means competence is illegal, and that means good outcomes are increasingly rare, particularly as the diversity ouroboros sprouts more heads of its own making.

Featured image credit: Bloomberg

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1. https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/

2. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

3.

4. Page 19

5. https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7

6. Page 18

7. Pg 20

8. Page 19

9. Discussed in the disparate impact section of this article:

10. https://thepostmillennial.com/black-woman-fired-after-being-late-to-work-47-times-sues-equinox-for-discrimination-wins-millions

11. https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7

12. My friend John Carter wrote in-depth about the Bloomberg report that found this outcome :

If No One’s Hiring White Guys, What Are They Doing With Themselves?

13. https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/04/20/nearly-400-colleges-universities-refuse-close-dei-offices/

14. Discussed in this article:

15. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/lets-talk-about-discipline-and-disparate-impact-again; https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/restoring-equality-of-opportunity-and-meritocracy/

16. https://www.newsweek.com/penny-sized-black-hole-earth-what-would-happen-1579750

17. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

19. Palladium notes how the Griggs decision led to the college degree requirement here: https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

20. https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/disparate-impact-isnt-enough

21.

22. https://nuscimagazine.com/semiconductors-the-backbone-of-the-modern-world/

23. https://thehill.com/opinion/4517470-dei-killed-the-chips-act/

24. https://thehill.com/opinion/4517470-dei-killed-the-chips-act/