HERE YOU GO SAMSON an example of exactly waht i was talking about the double standard,
Supreme Court rules New Haven discriminated against white firefighters
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June 29, 2009
by Andrew | neoHOUSTON
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This, from the Wall Street Journal, is worth reading in full. For those in a hurry, here are the highlights:
The U.S. Supreme Court, voting 5-4 in a case that has been a lightning rod for high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, invalidated a Connecticut city’s decision to scrap the results of a firefighter promotion exam in which the white candidates scored better than their black peers.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the court’s opinion, said the city of New Haven violated a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits employment discrimination.
“Whatever the city’s ultimate aim – however well intentioned or benevolent it might have seemed – the city made its employment decision because of race,” Kennedy wrote.
“The city rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white.”
Kennedy said an employer cannot throw out an exam unless there is strong evidence that the test harmed minorities. New Haven did not meet this standard, he said.
The court’s four other conservative justices joined Kennedy’s opinion.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing in dissent for the court’s four liberal members, said while she had sympathy for the white firefighters, the court’s decision ignored evidence that the city of New Haven’s promotion exam was flawed and that New Haven correctly responded to the biased results.
“Firefighting is a profession in which the legacy of racial discrimination casts an especially long shadow,” Ginsburg wrote. “I would hold that New Haven had ample cause to believe its selection process was flawed and not justified by business necessity.”
The case rested on the question of whether New Haven acted validly in choosing not to use the test results because the scores meant that no black candidates were eligible for promotion.
A group of white firefighters sued New Haven’s mayor and other officials, arguing that city engaged in unconstitutional race discrimination by blocking their promotions. City officials responded that the test may have discriminated against black test-takers, which could have placed New Haven in violation of federal civil rights laws if it had made promotions based on the test results.
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Ginsburg said the appeals court incorrectly focused on the city’s “intent” to not discriminate rather than focusing on New Haven’s justifications for blocking the promotions. However, she said the city still should have prevailed.
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The case dates back to 2003, when New Haven decided to fill 15 slots for lieutenants and captains in its fire department. The city contracted the test’s creation to a consultant company, who administered the test that fall. The exam consisted of a written, multiple-choice section, which counted for 60% of the total score and an oral assessment, weighted 40%.
Firefighters of all races had passed the test, but not proportionally. Of the 19 firefighters who qualified for a promotion, none were black, though two were Hispanic.
Troubled by the fact that the black firefighters had passed the test at roughly one-half the rate as the white firefighters, the city’s civil service board held five public hearings and ultimately deadlocked on whether to certify the test scores, which resulted in no promotions across the board.
Here’s a simple truth. Racism won’t ever fully go away until we put the past behind us and start thinking of people as people, not as one subset of people or another. The fact is, it is possible at any time that in a room with 10 black people and 10 white people that the 10 black may have worked harder and studied more than the 10 white people. If the black people then do better on a test than the white people, does that mean the test was racist? Why do we think of things differently when the colors are reversed?
I understand cause for concern when the people passing a test are disproportionately members of one group or another. However, it’s the TEST that matters, not the RESULTS. Is the test fair or is it not?
First, look for obvious discrimination. Is there some cultural factor present in the test that puts non-white people at a disadvantage? And how on earth did a culture specific question get into a firefighters’ exam?
If obvious discrimination isn’t present, look for things that aren’t obvious. Are there specific questions that only the white candidates knew the answers to? If so, figure out why, get rid of that question in the future (and confront the person who wrote it!), and don’t count that question for this test. College professors do this all the time, applying ‘curves’ to factor in possibly unfair or confusion questions based on the results of a test.
But if there is no obvious discrimination in the test, and no specific questions that one group knew the answer to and the other didn’t, then there’s no reason to think of the test as racist.
New Haven held five public hearings on the issue and could not decide whether the test was flawed. What that says to me is that they couldn’t find anything specifically wrong with the test, but could not get past the ‘imbalanced’ results that it produced. They felt this way specifically because it was the white people who passed the test. We live in a culture now where we assume that white people are part of some grand racial conspiracy, that racism is so hard-wired into the white population that they cannot help discriminating against others at all times.
This isn’t true, and is in fact a racist thought process. We need to do away with this kind of thinking, and give people the benefit of the doubt. Forgive minor accidental offenses when people genuinely apologize and change their behavior. It should take more than one minor mistake for us to accuse someone of something so dispicable as being truly racist.
I’m glad these firemen stood up for themselves and confronted racism when they faced it. Too often white people are so afraid of being called racist themselves that they do not confront racism when they encounter it. These firemen are doing the entire nation a service, and helping us to move closer to a future where racial discrimination is truly gone. I don’t know whether we’ll ever completely achieve that dream, but the one thing we must not do is let distance diminish our pursuit.
IF THOSE BLACK MEN HAD BEEN DENIED THEIR RAISE FOR THE REASON THEY USED TO DENY THE WHITE GUYS SHIT WOULD HAVE HIT THE CEILING, THE FLOOR AND BOUNCED BACK THEN HITTING THE CEILING FAN....
And since you think i am lieing about black people getting curves on the pre employment test i took and you wana act like that dont happen here you go
The use of the binomial test is appropriate ..... sample pass rate difference's position on the normal CURVE, and thus supplies in- ..... tained if the issue is framed in terms of white-black fail rates ...
