New Haven Firefighters Test

As we know from class the other day, there is now a case before the Supreme Court involving firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut, and an exam they took for promotion.

Because no African-Americans scored well enough to earn promotion, the test was called invalid -- and no-one was promoted. Those who did pass the test -- including Frank Ricci, who is dyslexic, and who went to extraordinary efforts to do well -- felt that they were being treated unjustly, and sought retribution in court.

Here are two opinion pieces dealing with the case. The first is by John McWhorter, a linguist and commentator. To McWhorter,

"the issue is less about color than class, and in the global sense, about what it is to be human.

In countless American communities, flyers are routinely full of major misspellings, more than a few people are only fitfully comfortable with e-mail, and few read newspapers above the tabloid level. Life is fundamentally oral. People from places like this (which include Appalachia and the rural white South, as much as black and brown inner cities) get next to no reinforcement from home life in acquiring comfort with the written word beyond the utilitarian.

Direct questions as regular interaction are largely an epiphenomenon of the printed page. Most humans on earth lead fundamentally oral lives in the linguistic sense (only about 200 of the world's 6,000 languages are written in any serious way, for example), and need to adjust to direct questions. Middle class American kids inhale them at the kitchen table. Other kids learn how to deal with them in school; it takes practice, and because our public schools are so uneven, quite a few never get really good at it."

McWhorter finishes his piece with advice that Chief Justice John Roberts probably would agree with.

This will not do: People like Du Bois did not dedicate their lives to paving the way for black people to be exempt from tests. Sure, the tests may not correlate perfectly with firefighters' duties. But which falls more into the spirit of black uplift that you could explain to a foreigner in less than three minutes: teaching black candidates how to show what they are made of despite obstacles, or banning a test of mental agility as inappropriate to impose on black candidates?

McWhorter's article appears on The New Republic website. Also on the website is another article, by Jeffrey Rosen, which mentions not only the New Haven case but also a challenge to the extension of the Voting Rights Act (2006). Rosen writes that

The Ricci case is a nightmare for moderate liberal supporters of affirmative action, because it presents the least sympathetic facts imaginable. The Supreme Court has said repeatedly that affirmative action is most troubling when its burdens are concentrated on a few innocent white people rather than being widely dispersed among a large group of white and black applicants. So, for example, the Court in 1985 struck down a teachers' union agreement that white teachers would be fired and black teachers with less seniority would be retained in order to preserve racial balance.

Rosen thinks that the focus on job discrimination should be at the hiring level. Once you've got the job, he says (agreeing with McWhorter), it's up to you to do what you need to do to gain promotion. Rosen feels that President Obama is in a unique position to be able to push Congress to pursue this "middle way".

Obama could wean liberals of the resort to the threat of lawsuits to avoid discrimination in the workplace at all levels. Instead, he might convince Congress that judicial oversight of employment decisions makes more sense when it comes to entry-level hiring decisions, which are more likely to be affected by stereotypical judgments than cases of promotion and firing. At the moment, the vast majority of "disparate impact" cases involve challenges to promotion, demotion, or firing, rather than hiring--but these are precisely the kinds of cases in which impulsive, unconscious racism is least likely to materialize.

Stay tuned.