Comment by Amezarak

There are many well-documented cases of this sort of thing happening in the 1980s and even earlier.

https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...

Note that here, Philip Morris explicitly said they used race-norming to hire minorities at the expense of people who performed better, but belong to the wrong race.

In some cases, it was court ordered: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-07-mn-22054-...

In this case, a test acknowledged as meritocratic caused too many minorities to be excluded, as nearly all the top performers were white. The fire department was sued, and ordered by a judge to hire at least 40% minorities -well above the applicant rate. They hired 55% minorities. Eventually SCOTUS ruled there was nothing wrong with the test - meaning for years, white applicants were discriminated against.

Here's another example, which obviously not only shows political and legal pressure to promote minorities specifically (even mentioning specific quotas!), but documents specific instances of policies that succeeded in doing so anti-meritocratically: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-GGD-95-85/pdf...