I didn’t take any time to say anything about the recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision on the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, in which city officials in New Haven, Connecticut, threw out the results of a job promotion exam for the city fire department because none of the black candidates who took the test scored high enough to qualify for a management job in the department.
City officials panicked when they saw the results and feared a discrimination suit from those who didn’t meet the required score. They had not planned on a lawsuit from the white and Hispanic firefighters who did score high enough.
The result was a massive discrimination and affirmative action firestorm (pun intended). The result was a close decision in which the Court’s conservatives saw it one way, and the Court’s liberals saw it another.
While I’m happy to see the result, what worries me is that it was a close vote. In fact, what worries me even more are the reasons given by those who have decried the Court’s decision. Not once have I heard any of the dissenters say one damn word about qualifications. Over and over and over again they’ve touted the routine terms of “fairness” and “diversity.” The superficiality is the most important thing for them.
In May, Salon’s Joan Walsh didn’t want to mention anything but the candidates’ skin color. She lamented that the United States’ paid fire departments are “disproportionately not just white, but Irish Catholic” and that in New York, the “majority of New Yorkers are black or Latino, and only ten percent are firefighters.” She not once mentioned ability.
This was also the case on TV and the radio. On KMOX, a gentleman expressed concern over the types of questions that were used (e.g., multiple choice versus true and false versus fill-in-the-blank versus essay). His argument was that certain kinds of questions are unfair to certain ethnicities. I’ve heard of question topics having a bias, but now we’re getting to a point where we’re supposed to think that whites and Hispanics have an advantage when multiple choice questions are asked? Seriously?
Getting back to my point: This job was for a fire department position. The fire department is part of the emergency services field, along with the police force and EMS. These are jobs in which split-second decisions have to be made. These are jobs in which physical standards have to be met simply in order to do the job properly. These are jobs in which a person’s skin color or sex do not matter because the outcome—saving a human being’s life—must be the most important thing. The bottom line is the only thing that matters.
A burning building doesn’t care if it’s being doused with water from a hose which is held by a black man, white man, or Hispanic man. The fire doesn’t care if it’s a man or a woman. An automobile wreck won’t be any less or any more fatal depending upon what color the first responders’ skin is. A heart-attack patient won’t respond differently because of a paramedic’s skin color. A police officer responding to a bank robbery won’t be any more successful or any less successful just because his or her skin happens to be a certain shade.
Sadly, the critics of the recent Ricci ruling have no interest in saving lives. They’re only interested in image. Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said as much: “Firefighting is a profession in which the legacy of racial discrimination casts an especially long shadow,” she said, and explained that “blacks and Hispanics make up almost 60 percent of New Haven’s population, and that this should be reflected in the higher positions of the city’s fire department.” Ability be damned.
Ginsburg said, “The court’s order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power.”
The notion of the field of emergency services being based on the ability to save lives won’t have staying power, either. I only hope that if any of the dissenting justices or the critics of this ruling ever need a firefighter to save them from a bad situation that they have the balls to tell the first responders that they’ll wait for a rescuer who has a particular skin color.
After all, saving lives isn’t the important part of the job anymore, is it?
As an aside, it’s quite ironic that throughout this ordeal the people who usually call for America to be a “color blind” society have been the loudest to tout the virtues of using skin color to make decisions.
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