Really now?

Say you're building a daycare center. You accept applications and interview the applicants. Now, since you're working with children, you want to make sure you get the right people in there, people who've never been convicted of a felonious crime. But you're disallowed from asking that particular question and you cannot afford a background check for any applicant, you barely have enough money to keep the lights on.

So you ask yourself a few questions. How can I make it most likely that I won't hire someone with a felony conviction? Those kinds of rumors would destroy your daycare before it even started, so you have to make sure your risk of a bad hire is as small as possible.

So you go to statistics.

You ask the following questions:

Which racial population is least likely to have applicants who were previously convicted? Asians. Most likely to have been convicted? Blacks.

Is it wrong to use that data when factoring your hiring decision? It is absolutely judging the applicants on their immutable characteristics, but is minimizing the risk of a bad decision due to inaccessibility to information pertaining to the individual applicant.