This was an interesting case to follow:
The Supreme Court handed a victory Monday to a group of white firefighters charging racial discrimination, while also giving some fodder to critics of President Barack Obama’s pending nominee for the high court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a court split 5-4 along ideological lines, reversed an appeals court ruling Sotomayor joined last year that rejected a claim that the City of New Haven, Conn. discriminated against white firefighters by throwing out a promotional exam after all the African-American firefighters who took it scored too poorly to be promoted.
“Whatever the City’s ultimate aim—however well intentioned or benevolent it might have seemed—the City made its employment decision because of race. The City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white,” Kennedy wrote on behalf of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
“Courts often confront cases in which statutes and principles point in different directions,” the Kennedy opinion noted.
Sotomayor and her supporters might have a very different view of the decision, but I am inclined to agree with it. This case has been called the “reverse discrimination case,” however, there is no such thing. Either there is discrimination or there is not. In this instance there was clear and apparent discrimination – against white men.
Sotomayor attempted to defend her position in a previous comment, stating:
“We’re not suggesting that unqualified people be hired, the city’s not suggesting that,” she told a lawyer for the white firefighters. But “if your test is going to always put a certain group at the bottom of the pass rate so they’re never, ever going to be promoted, and there is a fair test that could be devised that measures knowledge in a more substantive way, then why shouldn’t the city have an opportunity to try to look and see if it can develop that?”
The problem with her statement is that there is no evidence that the test was biased in favor of white people primarily the test had only been administered once. There was no history of black firefighters doing just as well as white firefighters and being passed over. There was no evidence that the test questions were skewed towards things that a black person, by virtue of his social and economic status, could not answer.
Instead, what the city did was try to cover itself from potential lawsuits while Sotomayor engaged in open discrimination against white men. While that is a charged accusation, it is applicable because Sotomayor’s comments demonstrate that her ruling had nothing to with precedent in this particular case, but with Sotomayor making the specific political statement, through her ruling, that equality means equal acquisition even at the expense of others regardless of ability or skill.
That is the fundamental issue at play, one that many on the left do not want to touch or even discuss. However, it is a pertinent issue because there are going to be instances where white people outperform minorities for no other reason than those white people happen to be better at whatever skill than the minorities applying for the same position. The opinion Sotomayor and her supporters suggest is that a white person can never and would never outperform minorities without some sort of bias or preferential treatment at play. Worse yet, their remedy for the “problem” is to do to those white people what was historically done to minorities. Had the Supreme Court not ruled in the white firefighters favor, those men (and the one latino among them) would have had to take a new test specifically skewed in favor of minorities.
That is blatantly biased and all that does is create quota system, which was noted in the article:
“The unmistakable logic of Sotomayor’s position would encourage employers to discriminate against high-scoring groups based on race — no matter how valid and lawful the qualifying test — in any case in which disproportionate numbers of protected minorities have low scores, as is the norm,” a legal commentator for National Journal, Stuart Taylor, wrote. “Such logic would convert disparate-impact law into an engine of overt discrimination against high-scoring groups across the country and allow racial politics and racial quotas to masquerade as voluntary compliance with the law.”
It is important to remember that there are instances were race becomes a factor in testing. There instances where a person’s economic and social status place them at an automatic disadvantage, particularly when they are asked questions about things they have never read about, seen or heard of. That can certainly create an imbalance. However, the remedy for that is not to punish the other group by denying them the achievements they worked hard for or by crying discrimination when not enough of a particular group makes it through.
Equality is not about equal acquisition, but equal and fair opportunities. Everyone gets to start from the same starting line. No gets a head start, no one gets an automatic win and certainly no one is entitlement to win over others. That is not how equality is supposed to work. Unfortunately, people like Sotomayor do not seem to understand that.
Having not really followed the case, it’s been very odd to me to me that the there’s a question of bias within the test. How do you make a racially biased firefighters test? The dissenting opinion seems to indicate that there are less biased tests (which I honestly don’t know how that could be possible). What specifically about the test was biased?
That is the proverbial rub: they never stated what the bias was. From what I recall, once the city decided the test was biased they pulled the test completely and refused to give even one example of a biased question. Chris Matthews had someone from the city on his show and when he asked for something that demonstrated a bias the official dodged the question. Matthews kept asking, but never received an answer.
Personally, I do not see how the test could be racially biased either since all the questions pertain to things the firefighters would already know and all the firefighters were told what materials to study. It is a little different from the SAT and ACT where it is very easy to be unprepared for the test because some schools might not teach certain material. When I took the ACT, there were portions of the math section that confused me because I had no idea how to solve the problem as I had never seen anything like it before.
Equality is not about equal acquisition, but equal and fair opportunities. Everyone gets to start from the same starting line.
Yeah people seem to have a hard time understanding that equal opportunity is not the same as equal result. And I wonder how people would be reacting is this all started with a situation of 17 latinos and 1 white person? More than likely that 1 white person would be shamed into staying silent by the very people that claim to be progressive and are out to help everyone.
It would be tricky, but I would imagine the city probably would have done the same thing because socially speaking blacks have been more maligned than latinos. Whether Sotomayor would have agreed with the city’s decision in that situation is a different matter. It would be difficult to imagine that she would give that latinos would have passed the test.
tbmf: people who study tests have a surprising number of criteria for measuring such things. Sadly, I don’t have my book about assessment handy so I can’t give too many specifics.
But, at the same time, a test must be structured in a way that makes it cost-effective to administer and grade. Everyone familiar with the ins and outs of the SAT, for instance, absolutely hate the goddamned thing, but they will agree that if you’re going to grade three million or so copies of the same test, it’s physically impossible to do it much differently.
And what’s the purpose of civil service testing anyway? To de-politicize the allocation of public jobs. There was a time in the US when we didn’t have civil service tests, and the result was a corrupt spoils system, resulting in such things as the assassination of James Garfield. This is a point that seems to have been lost in the mix.
But a key point to make is that there is no such thing as a test which is COMPLETELY unproblematic, and my understanding of the Ricci case is that no one has demonstrated that the test was biased apart from using hearsay and innuendo.
Incidentally, one cannot create a “neutral” test which determines (in advance) that such and such a percentage of those who pass it are going to be of a certain race or gender without changing the test to play towards a given race or gender. At that point, the test is no longer neutral because you are not committed to simply letting the chips fall where they may.
All evidence suggests the city really DID do its best to screen applicants based on merit. The preparation materials were given-out ahead of time and the questions were taken directly from the preparation material. The oral exam had three graders (one white, one black, one Hispanic) and something like $100,000 was spent on producing it. But since those who passed were almost all white, that suffices to prove that the test wasn’t fair as it didn’t yield predetermined results. (And how long did the black testers study the preparation material, exactly? Well, that’s immaterial.) The test results must be tossed-out, thus nullifying the need for civil service testing in the first place and returning us to a racially-based system of patronage updated for 21st century cities.
The answer is for people to understand that there is no a priori reason (other than ideology) for a meritocratic promotion system to produce ethnically/racially balanced results. Some people simply will not accept this and have to be either ignored or dragged along kicking and screaming.
I’m so sick and tired of far out lunatic “theories” from feminists that only whites can be racist and white men colonized the world to bring patriarchy all around the globe. What about women being raped, sliced and diced, then cannabalized in the Indonesian islands before European ships arrived? What about the recent violent seemingly racists massacre between the western Chinese and Uighurs? How does that fit in the structure of white men have it all/only white men can be racist? Such thoughts and imaginings contradict feminist “theory” to collapse into bitter pieces.
As I said on the other thread, this is not unique to feminism. It tends to be a liberal and progressive mentality to view racism as something only white people, specifically white men, can do. That said, the examples you gave do not fit into the “racism is a white man institution” paradigm, so I would assume that liberals and progressives would argue that such violence was at best discrimination and prejudice, not racism. One could argue that the same thing would apply to Nazis killing German and Austrian Jews, Polish and Russians. Those acts could not be considered racist because the victims technically were Caucasian and therefore were incapable of being victims of institutionalized violence, despite the Nazis acts being clearly institutionalized.