April Fools’ is still a few days away, but we already have a fake news story in mind: The NFL has announced the elimination of the 40-yard dash at its annual scouting combine due to its undeniably disparate impact on white players.

Here’s another: The NBA has announced that it will address the outrageous and longstanding disparate impact in its sport by mandating that 60% of its players be white, 19% Hispanic, 13% black, 6% Asian, and 1% Native American.

These stories aren’t particularly funny or creative, but they illustrate the ridiculousness of the so-called disparate impact doctrine — a legal doctrine that has plagued our nation and its employment laws for over half a century. According to the racial bean counters, disparate impact occurs when policies, practices, or systems that appear to be neutral in their composition end up having a disproportionate effect on certain racial groups [read: certain non-white racial groups].

The good news, though, is this: The Trump administration, in its root-and-branch efforts to rip out Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, has set its sights on this onerous and discriminatory legal precept.

On March 13, Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, announced that he’d filed a motion to vacate the little-known but extraordinarily influential 1981 Luevano consent decree, which arose out of a finding that certain racial groups performed better at standardized employment tests than certain other racial groups.

At issue was the use within the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management — essentially the nation’s HR department — of the PACE exam, a standardized test designed to predict job performance. “While 42.1 percent of white PACE examinees obtained a score at or above the required minimum,” Russell Warne writes at National Review, “only 5 percent of black examinees and 12.9 percent of Hispanic examinees did. This adverse impact was the sole reason that PACE became the topic of litigation, which resulted in the later consent decree.”

Warne is a research psychologist specializing in cognitive ability and educational tests, so he knows a thing or two about how to measure reasoning ability and intelligence. He adds that for a decade afterward, OPM tried to create a cognitive test whose criteria could predict job performance without disparately affecting the aggrieved groups. And failed. “As recently as this year,” Warne notes, “independent research showed that a test that meets both criteria of the Luevano consent decree — scientific validity and no adverse impact — is mathematically impossible.”

It seems so obvious: If you want to test folks on their ability to do a job, you have to test folks on their ability to do a job. This, of course, reminds us of the brilliant solution to racial discrimination that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts proposed back in 2007 before he started mainlining Beltway Kool-Aid: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

If only the Supreme Court had understood all this back in 1971, when it ruled unanimously in Griggs v. Duke Power Company that when a standardized test shows disparate impact, the employer must demonstrate the need for the test and must also show that there isn’t a less discriminatory test available. According to Griggs, then, employers were deemed guilty unless they could prove themselves innocent.

Ever since this disparate impact menace found a legal foothold, fundamental transformers like Barack Obama have been using it to wreak havoc. It was disparate impact, after all, that inspired his Department of Education’s infamous “Dear Colleague” letter and his federal-funding extortion, which sought to correct the classroom condition of black students being disciplined more often than Asians or whites.

The great Thomas Sowell addressed the issue of disparate impact 15 years ago, writing, “Criteria exist precisely to have a disparate impact on those who do not have what these criteria exist to measure. Track meets discriminate against those who are slow afoot. Tests in school discriminate against students who did not study.”

As I argued nearly a year ago, disparate impact is wrecking us — wrecking us as a people and wrecking us as a merit-based nation. As Heather Mac Donald puts it, “At present you can have proportional diversity or you can have meritocracy. You cannot have both.”

As for the Luevano consent decree, Warnes notes that the 2023 Supreme Court rulings on the racially discriminatory admissions practices at Harvard and North Carolina reveal a high court that has shown itself to be “extremely skeptical of any procedure that attempts to engineer proportionate outcomes for racial groups in education and employment.”

The right court case will need to wind its way upward, and that will likely take years. But when it does, the Supreme Court will have yet another opportunity to rule in favor of color-blindness and against the corrosive practice of racial discrimination.