Why do White People Have to Outscore Everybody Else on Tests? And Other Questions You've Wondered but Didn't Dare Ask!
Frank Ricci just wanted to ace his firefighters exam.
He rallied to overcome dyslexia and "several learning disabilities." He spent more than $1,000 to purchase study materials and to pay his neighbor to read them on tape to him. And never mind the 8 to 13 hours a day he studied to prepare for the test.
The white firefighters Supreme Court decision generates far more media buzz and public interest than the other 33 cases decided by the Court since May of this year.
First, the heroic status of firefighters after 9/11 is only growing.
Add the mounting pique of perceived racism against whites to our fascination with firefighters and you get the picture why Ricci v. DeStefano pops with such notoriety.
In 2003, 118 firefighters took examinations required for promotion to lieutenant or captain in the city of New Haven.
When the firefighters took the exam, only eight lieutenant and seven captain positions were open. Such promotion examinations are offered infrequently, so firefighters felt the stakes were high.
On the lieutenant exam, the pass rate for white candidates was 58.1 percent; for black candidates, 31.6 percent; and for Latino candidates 20 percent. On the captain exam, the pass rate was 64 percent for white candidates and 38 percent for both black and Latino candidates.
Due to the severe discrepancy in test scores, New Haven faced a dilemma: Should it certify the results or scrap them?
So 18 firefighters (Ricci, 16 other whites, and one Latino) sued the City: New Haven discriminated against them on the basis of race, they charged, when it shelved the test results.
The question before the Supreme Court: Did the city of New Haven discriminate against the 18 plaintiffs by annulling the test? Was New Haven's plan to shield itself from "adverse-impact" lawsuits from minorities legally justified?
No, said the Supreme Court's 5-4 majority opinion.
"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify the City's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," writes Justice Kennedy in the ruling decision. "All the evidence demonstrates that the City rejected the test results because the higher scoring candidates were white. Without some other justification, this express, race-based decision-making is prohibited."
Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas joined the majority decision.
"The white firefighters who scored high on New Haven's promotional exams understandably attract this court's sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion," notes Justice Ginsburg in the dissenting opinion. Reaffirming a lower court ruling -- which present nominee Sonia Sotomayor once joined -- Ginsburg maintains: "The intent to remedy the disparate impact of a promotional exam is not equivalent to an intent to discriminate against non-minority applicants."
Ginsburg tartly noted that New Haven's actions were "race-neutral" since everyone's test result was discarded -- nobody was promoted!
During the Obama Multiracial Honeymoon, this case would seem to be No Big Deal. But in Reality, this case lands at our feet against a very prickly racial backdrop.
Economic insecurity often trumps social idealism. Ricci -- for all his scrappy ambition -- is a sympathetic victim, and an intelligible symbol, to most Americans.
Given our growing and intermixed minority populations, controversy broils about how Uncle Sam and local governments deal with race and opportunity. How can public institutions achieve "diversity" in a way that's fair and legal?
Both the philosophies and practices that further integration are under intense assault through many local government actions, voter initiatives, and court cases.
Two recent landmark Supreme Court rulings (2007) prohibit assigning students to public schools for the purpose of achieving racial integration and decline to recognize racial balancing as a "compelling state interest." (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson.)
In those rulings, Chief Justice Roberts scolded the government for its "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race."
Roberts: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
With a black president, impatience with affirmative action -- and behavior like New Haven's -- brews furiously. Doesn't a black president mean that racial discrimination has been vanquished? Can't minority grievances finally be buried? If not, when? When will white people no longer be held to different test standards than blacks? When will racial minorities scrap race as an excuse for failure? Four years? Eight years? Fifty years? When? See: There's a black president!
"We are all multiculturalists, now," Nathan Glazer once notoriously crowed.
Yes, we laud diversity and race mixing in public, but our actions don't stack up. "Americans Say They Like Diverse Communities -- Election, Census Trends Suggest Otherwise," declares the title of a 2009 study just released by the prestigious Pew Research Center. "Despite most respondents' stated preference for 'diversity,'" the study concludes, "American communities have grown more racially, politically, and economically homogenous in recent decades."
All of this helps explain the quiet, but formidable, riot that is the white firefighters' discrimination case.
Is Ricci the end of the White Man's Burden? Or the beginning of white racial grievance?
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Try to be honest here.
While tests may be biased... in this case in favor of a dyslexic, white male... not because of a disadvantage, but because of his determination and hard work, the question is should we turn a blind eye to qualifications?
How do lawyers pass the bar examination? Do you favor eliminating the bar examination?
How do doctors become certified? Do you favor eliminating the certification process?
How do business students become CPAs? Do you favor eliminating the CPA exam?
Do you feel so strongly that egalitarian principles must come first that you are personally willing to risk using a lawyer or doctor or CPA who really does not have the knowledge necessary to help you?
We are equal in the eyes of the law, but that is with respect to rights, not with respect to qualifications.
This is a tempest in a teapot. Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice whether or not she is the most qualified. This is a purely political show in a defacto one-party system. So why all of the angst?
Part II:
So this test (like most such tests) will reflect class differences and advantages bestowed on whites as a result of racism (i.e., better schools, greater wealth, informal white networks), including knowing how and what to study and having the time and resources to devote to study. These advantages are not the "fault" of the individual white firefighters, but neither are the disadvantages the fault of the black firefighters. This decision effectively ignores the larger social question and places full responsibility for solving this structural problem on individual victims. Thus, it legitimates the inequality, implicitly blaming the racial deficit on cultural or other factors. The role of the goverment and the courts is not to correct the disadvantage by devising methods that neither reward whites nor punish blacks for the effects of institutional racism. The solution to institutional racism, then, is found in the individual and not the institution.
Part I:
It seems to me that if you had to spend more than $1,000 to purchase study materials and study 8 to 13 hours a day to pass the test, then how is it that the test is measuring work performance? If the test were based on work performance, then one would assume that after having worked in the department for the requisite number of years just to be able to take the exam would be sufficient to pass the test with minimal or no study. Most college students do not spend that much or study that hard for the SAT or any of the professional school exams. Remember, these guys are firefighters, not surgeons. Heck, the bar exam sounds easier than the exam that they took. For that reason alone, the test seems suspect in light of racial disparities in wealth and opportunities. The fact that blacks have 7 to 11 cents for every dollar of wealth that whites have may in itself explain much of the disparity in test scores. Ricci may have asked his father for the $1000 or inherited it from his grandfather. Black firefighters generally will not have these resources.
The white man feeling the pain so many have experienced and still do.
Good for the white firefighters! The City of New Haven, hiding behind the bunkers in fear of lawsuits by quota groups, didn't figure the white people would sue. Glad they did, it is a lot better than lowering the bar to accomodate somebody's goofy idea of social engineering, which so often happens.
The inner city educational system has failed. Our children are all born equally, yet by fourth grade the inner city schools have notoriously lower test scores and performance overall. The drop out rates in the poorer communities is higher, the SAT and ACT scores lower. We have allowed our children to be victims of a government system designed to fail. I have no way of knowing the educational backgrounds of the the minority firefighters who tested poorly, but I would speculate they went to failed public schools, never learned proper study habits and were probably socially promoted, as our system demands. It has been a critical issue for decades and neither the republican or democratic leaders have addressed it, with the exception of no child left behind, which looked good on paper, but was unable to address the situation. The teacher's union will make certain, with their lobbying efforts, that the current system of failure remains. While the test itself was not discriminating the history of education most likely was.
The Education is run by and made up of mostly Liberals. If you don't know this then you don't know teachers. The Superintendents, Principals and teachers do not want these inner city students to fail and you can believe they are not rewarded for the failures. So why do the kids fail.
Piss poor parenting. Many of these students are the children of absentee parents. They get no supervision at home and no discipline. Racism is blamed for every failure. Education is not valued and school work is not done.
Don't believe me? Why do Asians do so well and are not included in quotas for college applications? They are an extremely small demographic yet they are very successful in gaining an education. Their culture values education.
By the way, I attended inner city schools and my wife spent almost 10 years teaching at one. It's not like I grew up in some lily white suburb and learned of our inner cities from television.
Sorry, I hate to rain on your ethnic mythology parade, but if you closely examine Asian immigrants (which includes approximately 45 different nationalities), a few salient points are clear: 1. due to immigration policies, Asian immigrants are a select group, representing the cream of the crop in their native countries and with a percentage of professionals that doubles that of other immigrants (not to speak of native blacks); 2. you cannot compare "Asians" who arrived here largely after 1965 with native blacks who have been here for more than 10 generations and have been excluded from educational and other opportunities; 3. "Asian" immigrants should properly be compared with the second generation offspring of other immigrants who are in the upper middle class.
Culture now replaces genes as the explanation for black socio-economic conditions. But, cultural racism is the same as biological racism, as culture is reified and treated as an unchangeable trait. It ignores the fact that first generation immigrants (including Jews) exhibited similar behavior when they lived in urban ghettos. It is the condition that causes the behavior, not vice versa. The values that you glorify are simple "middle class" values. The fact that Asians have middle class values shows that they are middle class and nothing more.
Was New Haven's promotional exam more closely related to performance on the job than any of the less discriminatory alternatives?
For those spectators that feel "vindicated" about the Court's decision, here are some facts about the Ricci case .
1) Opportunity for advancement in civil service has been denied to many African American and Latino firefighters across the nation through both overt and subtle discrimination.
2) The firefighter test used for promotion consisted of questions that had nothing or very little to do with leadership (they were, testing for positions that expected "greater leadership" like positions of lieutenants and captains).
3) The majority of the white applicants lived outside the City of New Haven in suburbs that provided greater opportunities for volunteer firefighting positions AND come from families that have multiple legacies of firefighting (fathers, uncles, grandfathers). In addition, there was a "network" of white firefighters many of the white test takers could tap into. A subtle advantage, no doubt.
4) The Firefighter's Union, (white, black, and Hispanic members), used union dues to pay for legal defense for Ricci's litigation.
5) The test was designed to focus on fire runs, rather than the more common emergengy/medical calls.
6) White firefighters had access to testing information earlier—through a "network" of friends, family, instructors of the extra training courses, and connections at testing companies.
1) In this case the City never proved "Opportunity for advancement in civil service has been denied to many African American". They did not even look at it.
2) The test tested for Both leadership AND knowledge of the job...fighting fires. Again the City never proved or investigated this claim.
3) Everyone is welcome to serve as a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs. The City did not look into this subtile advantage.
4) The Firefighter's Union used the dues to pay the legal fees because Union members were denied promotions they had earned AND the work they would have been doing was being done either by lower rank people (who did the work without the pay) or by overburdening existing Captains. Either way it was unfair to Union members. The Union did not collect dues to protect just minority members but all members. Based on the ruling the Union was RIGHT to back their members.
5) Were the positions to be filled FIRE Captains or EMT?
6) The Union makes instructors of the extra training courses, and connections at testing companies available to ALL members. Ricci "spent more than $1,000 to purchase study materials... And never mind the 8 to 13 hours a day he studied to prepare for the test.". Did those who had lower scores study as hard? Again the City did not look at that.
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
We have a black president who rose from humble beginnings to achieve the highest position in the country. Did he get any special breaks? Did everybody lower the bars for him? no they did not. I refuse to believe that black people are not as smart and able as white people. The problem is, you've got to want the prize badly enough to go all out for it. Focus. And don't wait for someone to hand it out because they feel guilty. That's crap.
Humble beginnings? He had a more diverse and expensive education than most Americans could even begin to dream of. He went to prep schools and ended up at Harvard. He did not grow up in mainstream America. In fact since he thinks his time in Indonisia when he was (7?) makes him an expert on all things Muslim, that itself gives even more rise to the point that he did not have humble beginnings.
I really don't care how he was raised, since a lot of politicians are born with more advatages, but there are genually some who were born to humble means. Obama is not one of them.
Guess they didn't grade on a curve. (snark)
Honestly, given a choice, most people would choose the highest test scorer for their life-saving purposes, regardless of race.
New Haven should've discriminated on the basis of test scores, since there are no laws saying low test scorers are entitled to any civil rights protections.
Richard your comments were very useful in that you have given a great deal more detail of the background than many other news reports, but it seems to me that a point being missed by most is that, even given the discrepancy in scoring, there WERE black and Latino firefighters who passed the test. So is it not racist to assume that only the whites would have been promoted?
No. Due to the "rule of 3," only whites (including one latino, who contrary to recent popular mythology are a white ethnic group like Italians, Greeks or Poles) would have been promoted.
They're insecure?
Has anybody actually seen the exam? Read the questions? Did the Supremes see the exam? Isn't it at all possible that the people who did better on the test just worked harder at it? I am not saying that is the case but it is possible.
See Richard M. Benjamin's Profile
Hi MsEngineer, Yes the Supreme Court has read the exam and reviewed extensive testimony from the test designers.
Great article Mr Benjamin. I would like to see an example of the questions where the disparity occured and see if I can tell why the differences happened.
"Chief Justice Roberts scolded the government for its "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race."" Then he returned to his all-white community before attending his all-white church and then relaxing by playing golf at his club where a few minorities may be serving drinks.
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