Lest anyone think that reverse discrimination has faded, consider that the City of New Haven threw out the results of a fire department promotion exam because no blacks scored high enough to be promoted.A group of the top-scoring white and Hispanic candidates sued and lost in a local court and then in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals--even though the exam was, as dissenting Clinton appointee judge Jose Cabanes noted, "carefully constructed to ensure no racial bias."
The white and Hispanic firefighters are taking their suit to the Supreme Court.
Whatever benefits accrue from reverse discrimination are well outweighed by the liabilities. It saddens me that current orthodoxy believes the opposite.
For details on this, see the ABC News report, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and syndicated columnist Linda Chavez coverage of this case.
I just read the Linda Chavez article, and she's absolutely right. If those scores had been thrown out because too many blacks and not enough whites scored high enough, this story would have made headlines for weeks.
ReplyDeleteWhy are we so concerned about appearance? Everything has to look right, and in the case of the New Haven Fire Department "right" means "diverse." Have we learned nothing from the past, when "right" meant "white?"
We have got to stop looking at form in cases like this and pay more attention to function. I do not give one thought to the race of my local firefighters and their leaders. What matters to me is whether they can put out fires.
If New Haven keeps watering down tests like these to make sure their fire department looks correct instead of functions well, they might have a lot more fires that they can't put out.
Dr. Nemko,
ReplyDeleteI propose that we simply call it discrimminion, instead of "reverse discrimination." "Reverse discrimination is a weird term that makes it sound different than normal discrimination, which it clearly is.