What look to be wrongful discrimination and fulfillment of FEO could coexist, if FEO is not construed as incorporating formal equality of opportunity but as a freestanding requirement. Suppose society is divided into mutually hostile racial and ethnic groups, each of which has roughly the same wealth, population, and social power.  Members of each group favor their own in economic decision making. The result is that the economy is divided into racial and ethnic spheres of influence. People of Scandinavian ancestry dominate the winter resort industry; people of Asian ancestry dominate the financial services industry, and so on. Formal equality of opportunity is routinely violated, because applicants of Scandinavian background are favored in winter resort hirings, applicants of Asian background are favored in competition for financial service posts, and so on. But overall, it happens to turn out that those with equal talent and equal ambition have overall equal prospects for success in competitions for positions that confer advantages, so FEO is satisfied. (Either members from each group form only ambitions for success in the types of enterprises in which members of their particular group are dominant, or for each person with given talents, lack of opportunity in one range of competitions for advantage is exactly offset by above-average opportunity is some other range of competitions for advantage, so each person with the same talent and same ambition has the same prospects for competitive success.)  The situation just described might seem unlikely to persist, but we might imagine government policy operating to sustain the conditions in which non-inclusive FEO is fulfilled even though formal equality of opportunity is not.