Somebody's Still Got a Problem

Dimension: Race

The Supreme Court has set a new standard for the role race now plays in hiring and promotion in their recent decision on Ricci v. DeStefano. The decision addressed the issue of whether or not the white firefighters should have been promoted (they should have); yet it does not address the issue of what happens when one group of people (in this case, Blacks) are excluded. The question that remains is at the core of the affirmative action debate: When is it okay to discriminate against one group in order to remedy discrimination against another group?

If we did a root analysis for why blacks tend to be excluded in cases like this one, I believe it would trace back to a number of social ills affecting blacks. But at this juncture is where I agree with Bill Cosby. We need to get our act together as Black people. At first blush when I heard about this case, I was convinced that the test must be culturally loaded. A test can be structurally fair but culturally loaded. An example of this is the classic Wechsler Intelligence Scales that routinely ranked black and Hispanic kids lower in the section on social situations and common concepts because of their responses. Earlier versions of the test were found to be culturally loaded because social situations vary across cultures and what might be considered a common concept for one culture may not be so common for another. The test was culturally loaded to favor whites. Whites were the norm for test reliability and validity.

That was not the case for the firefighter test. The city of New Haven gave special consideration to this concern and included Blacks and Hispanics in designing the questions. Yet, after taking the test, of the 19 firefighters who qualified for promotion two were Hispanic and none were black. Now, maybe if they had not included minorities in the design process and there were no people of color at all who passed the test I might be suspicious and question this outcome. The outcome is reasonable (but obviously still debatable since it was a 5-4 decision and previous courts had ruled otherwise).

The bottom line is that we are left with the poignant fact that no blacks passed this test. I know of a similar cases with similar outcomes. It leads me go back to examining disparities in education, poverty, single parenting--all social issues with disparate effect on blacks.

Today it is much, much harder to prove racial discrimination on the part of an employer. The bar has now been raised for black individuals to no longer have any excuses for performing at substandard levels or for not taking personal responsibility when we fall short. This will be a different kind of education for many blacks. We still need acknowledgment that racism and white privilege does exist. It has just gotten harder to begin with that as the direction for solving the problem.