The FDNY is NOT New York City’s "Most Racially Out-of-Balance” Agency!...

A federal judge (Nicholas Garaufis) recently ruled that multiple choice written exams “discriminate against black applicants” and charged the City of New York with “deliberate discrimination” for continuing to use such time-tested exams. That charge of “deliberate discrimination” sprang from the fact that “other remedies” (like replacing written exams with oral interviews) were suggested to the city after racial quotas (“1 in 3”) were used on the 1971 entrance exam.
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As insulting and racially defamatory as the view that "blacks are somehow handicapped just by being black" is, there's still MORE!
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How one set of such "ethnic disparities" is wrong and legally “actionable,” while others are never even mentioned, thus remaining immune from such “remedies” is an interesting dilemma, in and of itself.
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The primary reason for that seems to be political.
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According to the attorney for the New Haven 20 (Karen Torre) the feds picked Fire Departments to challenge because "they believed firefighters wouldn't fight back,” given their track record of 'sucking it up', soldiering on and just dealing with things as they come.
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The main reason given for such law suits and the remedies they result in is that, “Our institutions should look more like the communities that they serve.” Certainly the primary reason behind this current lawsuit against the FDNY, as in all the previous ones has been over the vaunted “racial and gender disparities in its makeup.” The charge has long been that, “the FDNY should look a lot more like New York City."
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What's really odd about this is that the FDNY is far from the most "racially out of balance" Department in the City of New York! According to current demographics (SEE: http://www.wordiq.com/definition/New_York_City), whites make up appx. 45% of the city’s population and account for 77% of the FDNY’s make-up - that’s a 1.67/1 ratio, or less than a 1 2/3X their numbers within New York City's general population. Even if one takes that 77% figure and throws out the “far more diverse” office staff and the EMS Units, and takes into account only the in-field uniformed workforce, said to be appx. 90% white that’s still a 2 to 1 ratio of whites relative to their numbers in NYC’s population!
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By comparison, while blacks comprise appx. 27% of NYC’s population, they comprise 65% of the Dept of Corrections personnel, a 2.4/1 ratio, or nearly 2½X the black personnel relative to their numbers within the city's general population...and blacks account for a staggering 78% of the Department of Juvenile Justice, which amounts to a 2.92/1 ratio, or a nearly 3 to 1 representation of blacks relative to their numbers within the city!
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So, why aren’t those, even greater racial/ethnic anomalies at least as large a concern as the FDNY’s much smaller racial disparity?
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Is it simply because far more College educated whites take the exams for Emergency Services jobs, virtually assuring a disparate outcome on those exams? That’s certainly one possibility.
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If so, then why aren’t the Dept of Justice’s and Nicholas Garaufis’ agendas not being viewed through a similar racial prism?
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To do the math yourself, you’ll need two sets of statistics; (1) The racial makeup of New York city is 44.66% White, 26.59% Black or African American, 0.52% Native American, 9.83% Asian, 0.07% Pacific Islander, 13.42% from other races, and 4.92% from two or more races. 26.98% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race. SEE: http://www.wordiq.com/definition/New_York_City and (2) the Demographics of City Agencies: http://www.citylimits.org/multimedia/257/new-york-city-s-agencies-by-race-ethnic-breakdown.
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There are TWO agencies in New York City that have over 1.5X the number of white employees than there are in New York City's general population. They are the FDNY and the Landmark's Commission, which, it turns out, actually has FEWER blacks and Hispanics in its employ than the FDNY does! There is only ONE other New York City agency in which whites comprise 60% of its workforce and that is the Office of Emergency management (OEM), which has a workforce that is exactly 60% white - a 1.3/1 ratio relative to the number of whites in new York City's population.
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Interestingly enough, despite blacks being only about 27% (26.59%) of New York City's population, or about 3/5ths or 60% of the number of whites in the city of New York, there are at least 7 agencies in which blacks comprise 60% or more of the workforce! In fact, black New Yorkers are the most OVER-REPRESENTED ethnic group in New York City's workforce.
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It turns out that New York City’s Civil Service is rife with far more startling ethnic anomalies than exist within the FDNY. There is even ONE New York City agency that records 0% Hispanics - the Office of Actuary, in a city that is 27% Hispanic! Moreover, there are at least TWELVE New York City agencies in which Asians are 1/2 or LESS than their numbers in New York City's population, including TWO agencies (The Civil Service Commission and, ironically enough, The Equal Employment Practices Commission) each with 0% Asian employees and ONE agency with just 1% Asian employees in a city in which Asians comprise appx 10% of the population!
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However, there are no less than 11 New York City agencies in which blacks are more than 1.5X their numbers in New York City's population!
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* The Department of Aging is 42% black. (appx 1.6X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* The Department of Youth and Community Services is 43% black. (1.6X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* The Department of Housing Preservation and Development is 45% black. (over 1.7X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* NYC Parks Department is 49% black. (over 1.8X their numbers in NYC's population)
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There are at least 7 New York City agencies in which there are more than double the number of black employees than their numbers in NYC's population.
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* The Human Resources Administration is 61% black. (2.2X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* The Equal Employment Practices Commission is 63% black (2.3X their numbers in NYC's population - Now there's an irony...AGAIN!)
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* The Department of Homeless Services is 64% black (2.3X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* The Department of Probation is 65% black (almost 2.5X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* The Department of Corrections is 65% black (also nearly 2.5X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* The Administration for Children's Services is 67% black (over 2.5X their numbers in NYC's population)
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* and the REAL "singular embarrassment", as far as "looking like the population of New York City" goes to the Department of Juvenile Justice at 78% black (nearly 3X their numbers in NYC's population).
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So, if written and physical standards aren't appropriate barometers for Municipal employment (and if they aren't, what good are such "services"?) and the primary goal in such hiring is to have the various city agencies "look like New York City", then why are there still agencies with 0% of some very visible ethnic groups and why are there so many more New York City agencies that are far MORE "racially unbalanced" than the FDNY?!
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If "looking like New York City" is key here, than it appears that there are dozens of New York City agencies that SHOULD HAVE been spending millions on recruitment decades ago, just as the FDNY has!
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Even just a modicum of consistency would be very much appreciated here.

Who Really Stands Against the Merit System?

With the recent drubbing that overt race/gender-based preferences took in heavily Democratic Michigan (the MCRI banning race-based preferences was voted in a 60/40 landslide), those so inclined realize they need new ways around the old problem of “disparate impact.”

“Disparate impact” has been the rallying cry of all those opposed to standardized exams in any form or venue.

While race and gender-based preferences in school admissions have been fueled largely by a misguided sense of redress, in employment, they’ve been fueled by something far more sinister.

Consider that to date, the overwhelming bulk of race/gender based preferences have been consigned to Civil Service positions that have traditionally been filled, at least since the days when nepotism and cronyism were eradicated by the Civil Service Merit System (CSMS), by various Civil Service standardized exams.

The interview process used in the private sector is innately subjective, but has withstood the most intense legal scrutiny, as have the battery of professional exams – the Law Boards, the five part CPA exam, various medical licensing exams, etc. which all suffer the same demonstrable "disparate impact" that all standardized exams do.

Only the lowly Civil Service exams have not been spared.

Coincidence?

Not very likely.

So, then who is the real enemy of the CSMS?


Is it women and/or blacks?

Certainly a number of groups representing plaintiffs from both those groups have filed numerous federal lawsuits usually based on the claim of “disparate impact,” but that is hardly indicative of any consensus among either of those groups against standardized testing nor the merit system.

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) has had lawsuits filed against it by both women’s groups and the Vulcans (a black fraternal organization) over the years. While women’s groups have argued that the physical portion of the firefighter’s entrance exam (weighted at 50% of the final score) is “discriminatory” against females because of its emphasis on upper body strength, the Vulcans have argued that the written portion of the exam is “discriminatory” against blacks because of, yes, “disparate impact.”

Both groups point to the fact that the FDNY is over 90% white and male as proof of some form of insidious, though unprovable discrimination.

The FDNY has always had the highest standards out of all the City’s Civil Service positions. Like all such Municipal positions, those standards have been watered down over the past three decades.

Still, the question remains WHO is the real enemy of the CSMS?

The only answer should be the most obvious one of all – the various Municipal governments are the real enemies of the CSMS.

Bottom-line, there are very few politicians who like the CSMS. It takes Municipal hiring out of political hands and puts those jobs, jobs that could be used as patronage positions to reward supporters, into an open and uniform system with a single standard for everyone applying for the various positions.

Politicians like patronage. They also like nepotism and cronyism. They don’t much like the CSMS.

Could that be why, while professional exams, like the Law Boards and CPA exams, tests that also suffer “disparate impact” have been defended and protected by court rulings, New York City, like other Municipalities have done little, if anything to defend the standardized exams forced upon those municipalities to remedy a very real, very deliberate and overt form of discrimination – patronage and cronyism?

Of course it could.

While many blacks and most women oppose segregated standards as much as they oppose any form of segregation, municipal governments oppose those standards because they’ve taken hiring decisions out of politician’s hands.

An end of the CSMS would mean a return to day when local politicians directly control the hiring within that municipality, returning a lot of leverage to local politicians that had been stripped away for decades.

While some “women’s groups” and some black fraternal organizations (like the FDNY’s Vulcans) have been used as tools to assail the CSMS, its municipal governments who’ve had the most to gain and therefore the deepest antipathy for the Merit System.

Race Hustlers Fight for Special Preferences for Blacks in Michigan, While Openly Endorsing White Supremacy

Michigan’s State Universities and it’s Governor Challenge the Will of the People of Michigan (their bosses) in Court!

The Michigan Citizen breathlessly reports, “Civil rights advocates are optimistic that the voter-approved affirmative action ban will eventually be completely rescinded. To delay the implementation of Proposal 2 at three major state universities is considered a win.

“I think this is a tremendous victory,” said George Washington, attorney for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). “Now we must mobilize to win a stay for the rest of the year and every year afterwards. We have an excellent chance of winning our lawsuit against this racist law.”

According to Mr. Washington, attorney for BAMN, “Proposal 2 created discrimination at the heart of the political process,” he said. “A veteran, a resident, an alumni, a son of a congressman or a university administrator can still get preferential treatment at the universities, but the only people who cannot are Blacks, Latinos and other minorities, and women.”

As John Rosenberg of Discriminations (http://www.discriminations.us/) points out, “By BAMN logic, a “veteran, a resident, an alumni, a son of a congressman or a university administrator” could all be excluded from or denied benefits of or be subject to discrimination under some educational program receiving federal assistance without running afoul of Title VI. Title VI, in this twisted view, affirmatively encourages discrimination against everyone except a small subset of people who are protected because of their specially protected “race, color, or national origin.” ”

There is nothing more "racist" (and I hate using that word) than presuming incompetence on the part of another.

Sadly, it is the essence of the white Liberal or "do-gooder." It's why those folks tend to see their ilk (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry, etc) as "erudite elites" and Conservatives from Dan Quayle to G W Bush as stumbling, bumbling imbeciles, who aren't as "enlightened" as they are.

Of course, these folks are actually pseudo-elites. Al Gore, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry all did far worse in College than did G W Bush.

Carter was a bright man, with absolutely no common sense and Bill Clinton was another bright man, who'd come up from poverty, but never developed a conscience in his travels.

Still, Clinton, at least had the common sense to be a pragmatist. He headed the DLC that tried to move the Democratic Party t the Right (back toward the center) and he signed onto 7 of the 10 planks of Gingrich's "Contract With America."

But back to preferences and presumed incompetence - when I first got on the FDNY (back in March of 1986), I worked with a black Battalion Chief named Reggie Julius (a real great guy, who'd worked with my Dad in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn back in the "war years" - the late sixties and early seventies, when ONE THIRD of the buildings in NYC burned down).

Chief Julius was not only a very bright guy, but he was a real character as well and he had a real problem with race and gender based preferences.

At that time, I'd met few blacks who opposed such things and was curious, so one day I asked him about it, and his response was, "Every time I walk into a room, I KNOW most of the people in there think I was given these stars (Battalion Chiefs wear two gold stars, one on each collar) and it pisses me off cause I was never given nuthin and never asked to be given nuthin by anybody. I scored at the top of every exam list on every test I took and I resent people assuming I didn't, but that's the stigma that quotas put on us - people just assume every black person is unable to compete."

Chief Julius had real self pride, not "ethnic pride," nobody ever "earned" their ethnicity, he was rightfully proud of the person he forged himself into being.

I think the thing that Chief Julious and other blacks who oppose preferences really understand is that there is no more tacit an endorsement of white supremacy than accepting race/gender-based preferences as necessary, as it endorses black incompetence and thus white supremacy.

In that regard, the real "white supremacists" are those who support race/gender-based preferences and the blacks who support them are the ones who've accepted white supremacy/black incompetence as reality.

It's NOT reality.

It's a false reality, partially enhanced by the stigma that so-good whites have heaped on those they claim they want to help.

The problem with "helpers" is that you're always looking down to those you help and unless you do a lot of self reflection, you can easily slip into feeling "better than" others.

That's probably why so much harm has been done in the name of "good intentions."

Education is access to knowledge and knowledge is a form of wealth and like any form of wealth, you can only get out of it, what you are able to put in.

That's why there are people like Bill Gates and others who've used knowledge effectively even though they've dropped out of College and why so many Lottery winners quickly wind up bankrupt after a few years - they're not prepared to leverage that money to earn them even more money, or to "grow their assets."

Even the premise that ethnic diversity holds some sort of mythical positive value is flawed, to say the least. In point of fact, ethnic diversity is value-neutral - that is, it has neither a positive nor a negative value.

Japan and Iceland do incredibly well with their homogeneous (non-diverse) populations, and places like Britain and France are now suffering with increasing diversity, albeit the root cause of those nation's problem seems to be an increasing Muslim population, not mere ethnic diversity.

Self-segregation is a fact of life.

I dealt with it in College, where the bulk of both blacks & whites CHOSE to sit together in class and in the cafeteria. I was one of two white players on the basketball team and saw this first-hand - sometimes members of the team would sit together and other times, they went their own ways.

Again, the problem with the very premise of race/gender preferences is the presumed incompetence it is rooted in.

Given that there is no such thing as "test bias," (there isn't), as Thomas Sowell has shown that the area with the greatest ethnic variance on such standardized exams, isn't the verbal section, as most would think, but the math section and in math, as Dr. Sowell notes, "Numbers are the same in the inner city, as they are in the suburbs," so the ONLY rationalization for race/gender preferences is the presumed incompetence of those groups who are deemed to require such preferences.

Are "donor," "alumni" and "geographic" preferences equally wrong?

Of course, in my view they are, though for different reasons - donor & alumni preferences amount to an illicit quid pro quo that shouldn't exist in the admissions process, while geographic preferences are themselves rooted in the fallacy that "geographic diversity" holds some mythic value that it quantifiably does not, as it too, is value neutral.

The fact is that most blacks prefer to live among other blacks, most whites among other whites and Hispanics among Hispanics. It may well be a false comfort, but for many, it is a comforting factor none-the-less.

It is probably why some blacks vehemently opposed the gentrification of Harlem and Bill Clinton opening an office up there almost ten years ago. They saw Harlem as "their community," and didn't want it changed.

Since Harlem has been "gentrified" many blacks have moved out, though some would say "they were forced out due to rising rents, etc.," it's just as true that many of them reacted the same way that many whites do when a white area becomes predominantly black or Hispanic - there's a sense of "not belonging," that comes with that and that is what many of the blacks who've left Harlem have articulated.

Choice, even short-sighted choice doesn't necessarily make one a bigot, because while bigotry is malevolent, such personal choices usually aren't. For instance, to a white male who is attracted to black women, a black women asserting that she's only interested in dating black males, might seem "prejudicial," if only because it impacts him negatively, but that woman certainly and without question has a basic right to date whomever she pleases, doesn't she?

Indeed, I can't imagine anyone denying that she has a basic human right to be discriminating in her own tastes. We ALL do, and we exercise such "discrimination" when choosing the color of our car, or the walls of our home, or our favorite foods...and yes, often when we choose our friends.

In fact, that's why preferences on standardized exams are not only wrong, but patently absurd. So long as the same exam is given to everyone, the rim is the same 10' for us all.

Now, if one were to argue that the jobs that DON'T rely on any standardized criteria and rely entirely upon the subjective "interview process," then I'd agree that THAT system relies on too many subjective, non-standardized criteria to be considered "fair." An interviewer black or white, may subconcsciously have an aversion to a candidate of a different background. I've always felt that such interviews should be vocoded (so you couldn't tell if its a man or woman by voice) and in a sort of Confessional box, where you couldn't see anything bu the interviewee's silhouette, ideally, in my view, most jobs should be filled via some objective, quantifiable standards, ideally some form of standardized exam.

Bottom line, any and all race/gender preferences violate both equal access to opportunity, as well as equality before the law. Of that, there is no question, for to give a preference to one ethnic group or gender is to deny that same preference (access to opportunity) and indeed inflict a barrier upon another.

The very idea of ethnic preferences spits in the face of the most basic principles this country was founded upon.



UPDATE:

In a recent development U.S. District Court judge David Lawson has barred intervention in the case by Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz, as the 6th Circuit Court has ordered an expedited briefing on Judge Lawson’s order enjoining Proposition 2.

It’s astounding that a federal judge doesn’t understand that a Constitutional Amendment that passed with nearly 60% of the popular vote, that bars race based preferences would even delay that law’s implementation.

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