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The first definition absolutely makes sense too. You just have to expand it and include a potential conclusion to that line of thinking.
Belief: Black people generally have lower IQ than whites.
Conclusion: I will not waste time interviewing black people as I don't want low IQ people for this job.
The problem is that just because a population of black people have lower IQ's, that doesn't mean an individual black person cannot have a high IQ and pull the average up. If his application otherwise looks good, it would be unfair to judge him merely on the color of his skin.
This kind of discrimination based on belief may not be intended to cause harm, but it is still obviously racist.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the belief.
If you want high-IQ people, give a double-blind IQ proxy test and don't be shocked when the results do not match the general population.
If you want athletic people who can haul a fatassed American out of a burning house, test that and don't be surprised when few or no women pass.
People are brain-broke about this shit. There is no impact of racism here, and probably never was. Companies generally aren't systematically racist, and never were. The bus company coordinated with the NAACP and sponsored Rosa Parks' lawsuit.
For the truly underprivileged, they will never get a better chance in life than an even break. Give them a simple test to see if they qualify, not a decades-long "education" of religious indoctrination and active falsehood geared to the mores of the upper class. THAT is where the "systemic racism" is.
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Sure, but to what degree can a selfish employer solve that issue? If a black man has a higher than mean IQ for his race, that means that now his time can now be bought, at a bargain price, and so I can get away with paying him less with the same amount of profit, which is what I want. I do better, my competition does worse because they were all "poopoo peepee, it's too much trouble for me" (which is how racism does its damage, and the crime-of-the-heart against which we want to convict). Yes, this doesn't last- because as he gains experience and credibility my ability to maintain the arbitrage decreases- but I can still find them and exploit it because I'm unwilling to listen if and when my moral compass tells me black men are inherently bad. That is itself labor and risk, as the normie sees it; should I not be justly rewarded for my effort [as compared to theirs]?
In this way we see that sufficiently-advanced mercantilism mitigates racism: indeed, these societies tend to converge on being less racist than others for this reason. (They're the least sexist, too, for similar reasons.)
I believe IBM is on the record, verbatim, as explaining that this is why they were willing to hire gay men in the '90s.
You are correct that it fails to solve racism. In your example, the fact that the reason the black man's labor was worth less remains caused by- and not even himself- but by the existence of other people that share his skin color being inherently worse than the median man of another color. One could make the eugenic argument that his success permits him to make more of himself, diluting the pool of 'people who look like him sucks ass' over time, but that doesn't happen for free (he's actually liable to reproduce less, not more, and you still have regression to the mean to worry about- which is an underrated benefit to affirmative action re: society offers, as part of his pension, that his "failsons" won't be left behind).
The difference between gay people and black people is that being gay doesn't correlate positively or negatively with work performance (unless it's fashion or interior design), but that's not what I wanted to talk about.
What both you and @FtttG are missing is that the cost of assessing and interviewing each candidate is non-negligible. If you have just five applicants for your job and one of them is black, skipping him or her because you think blacks have lower intelligence or impulse control is stupid.
But if you have five hundred applicants, and you believe can just throw out a hundred of them and raise the average quality of the remaining applicants for free, why not do so? It's the same as being a hiring manager at a white shoe law firm and discarding every resume that isn't from a recent Harvard or Yale law graduate.
As long as you have enough good applicants, you lose nothing by discarding specific groups. And you are correct that companies lower than you on the totem pole can exploit this by preferentially hiring from these groups.
The obvious other way out of this is making the applicants bear the cost of proving their worth. Have the applicants pay to get tested and get a blue checkmark: "certified not urban youth, more of an Urkel tbh".
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The belief that black people on average have lower IQs than white people in no way leads inevitably to the decision not to bother interviewing black people for an intellectually demanding role, any more than the belief that Kenyans and Ethiopians have a massive advantage in long-distance running leads inevitably to the decision to ban Caucasians from competing in marathons.
Sure, but belief + said decision is still racism, even if there was no desire to harm anyone behind it. And that type of decision making is often what people want to spread awareness about and litigate against.
But there's nothing intrinsically bad about holding the belief that black people have lower IQs, on average, than white people. It's analogous to saying that believing in gravity is bad, because it might lead people to the decision to push someone off a cliff. Factual statements and beliefs are morally inert.
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