> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
This heavily implies the opposite:
> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes CAN be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is NOT prohibited.
The problem is you’ve got an indicator that appears to favour white people, and a lack of evidence that the indicator shows anything of relevance to the actual position or job content.
Hypothetically, let’s say you were a racist, a nice easy way to do racist things like “disproportionately hire white people” would be to find some metric which disproportionately favours white people, and then evaluate everyone against that.
If you can prove it’s important for the job, you can discriminate still. For example, a Chinese restaurant can require knowledge of Mandarin, a metric which very likely favours people of Chinese descent. They just have to be able to explain why (e.g.: internal communication is in Mandarin, most of our customers speak Mandarin, etc).