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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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