Just out …
The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.
Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote in the 5-4 decision.
This one has been predicted to go this way for sometime and I’m glad it finally is official. Hopefully this case will serve as precedent for future challenges to instances of reverse discrimination.
Please share widely!
If the city had agreed to simply review the exam and show that someone in it did cause racial disparity, rather than just saying the results were racially disparate.
Three examples of that, please, with links or corroborating witnesses.
reverse discrimination (affirmative action) is needed? Otherwise why should I bother?
… is that because the original discrimination created a structural unfairness that perpetuates through generations, a mechanism is needed in order to rectify it.
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p>Personally, I’d be much happier with class-based affirmative action.
And I have been saying as much from time to time. I think we have a problem with people suffering from “white trash” discrimination as we do race. My lilly white town likes to talk down to the people who live in “South town name” as if they are lowly residents just because of their zip. When I lived in Wilmington they trash talked anyone from Billerica (while the people in Reading spoke down to the people from WIlmington).
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p>We do have a class issue and it sometimes is called racial. We have a race issue too for sure, but I think the current laws are the best you can do. You cannot legislate how people feel since I think that is one of the foundations of our freedom. I can dislike blacks, Italians, Irish, Liberals, woman, Democrats, gays, old people, Scots, cat-lovers or anyone else I want to. You can’t stop that.
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p>However, nobody should be discriminated against in their job or by the government and I would support any law which prevent this without infringing on the rights of others. If I go for a job and get it, but someone complains that the college degree which got me that job was no available to a black person so therefore I shouldn’t get the job, then how do you address the guy from Stanford who got the job instead of me when I say the Stanford education was available to me therefore he/she shouldn’t get their job?
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p>Obama (and thousands/millions of other blacks) have proven that blacks can get great education in the existing system. People should be hired (and fired) based on their brains and ambition and race should never be a consideration.
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p>Again concerning class… I have had many opportunities to advance in jobs but I didn’t play the games the right way. I didn’t join the Country Club to golf with the “right people” or drive the expensive cars and wear the $700 suits. I chose “not” to do those things companies want you to do and consequently didn’t get some of those big jobs. My problem was I can’t claim racial discrimination while a black person could even though we may both be suffering from the same “class” discrimination… if that makes sense.
I think discrimination is self-evident, but if you can come up with “reverse” examples, I’m game. I’ll even drop you down to two examples.
For starters…
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p>I especially liked this one because my own brother was a “victim” of wanting to be a firefighter and worked his ass off studying only to be denied the job while they searched for blacks (regardless of their scores)
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p>-He’s aware of everyone’s score? How?
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p>If we assume it’s true that the department had to “search for blacks,” then clearly the system was racially biased for many years, perhaps favoring legacy applicants.
test scores are public. John’s brother would have been well aware of other’s test scores until the last few years. Now the scores are in “bands” which don’t allow nearly as much transparency.
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p>As for “favoring” legacy applicants – that’s a fallacy. Everyone takes the same tests, both written and physical. If an applicant can’t measure up in either the physical test or the written, he/she won’t get the job.
There will always be more qualified applicants than open slots, so some decisions have to be made. There is an opportunity to favor legacy applicants (or “reverse discriminate,” as JohnD would have it).
but it generally doesn’t work that way. The old tests had each applicant listed in numerical order by score with the add on points – veteran status, degree, etc. A one-point difference can make the difference between a job and the curb. What typically happens in a city, lets say they’re looking for 10 firefighters, they’ll call in 20 or more from the last, and then they go through the interview process – physical, psychiatric eval, etc. It’s the same for police. And there’s no “blessing” of applicants – because it can open the city up for a civil service claim. Kids have been tossed over their social network page.
there is no room for corruption or cronyism? If so, I would say there always is.
Can’t type today.
How many nation wide searches have deposited former MA Democrats in great jobs (Bulger, Meehan, Sal’s sister, the Pike…).
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p>But on a civil service level, surely rules will have to be followed in general or lawsuits will come screaming out. I think your position should be to defend why this “reverse discrimination” was needed since there are few people out there who will deny “affirmative action” hires have touched just about every aspect of the workforce. They’re everywhere!
I think the burden of proof should be on you, because what you call “reverse discrimation,” I say does not exist. It’s not that non-white people are automatically virtuous, it’s that there is no institution in American life that has been untouched by its history. So in that sense, society is “racist” (the race just changes with time), and affirmative action is still needed. We will outgrow the need for it, but we aren’t there yet.
a determination for promotion or a job is decided – not by merit, or qualifications…but by the color of someone’s skin…then I think you’re going to have someone not happy about it. Civil Service isn’t perfect…but it’s the closest thing to keeping politics and other issues out of the decision-making process. This is not to say that once the lists are sent to the various cities and towns, that the local pols don’t “try” to get their guy in, but he/she can’t move someone who’s 50th on the list up to 10 without someone complaining to civil service.
Assuming that everyone was given an equal opportunity to take the exam, test scores are pretty objective in this context. I have yet to see evidence that the questions would somehow be inherently more difficult for one race to answer than the other.
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p>Ultimately, I agree with SCOTUS on this one, but I would caution against reading too much into it relative to Sotomayor. Being overturned on appeal does not make one a bad judge; it just means a higher court disagrees and therefore prevails.