Forcible Entry

(© United States Air Force)

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While I’m awaiting the outcome of a Supreme Court ruling involving affirmative action as it applies to the occupation of professional firefighting, I’m finding it scary to see how some people have turned emergency services into a field that, for them, is a way to play politics instead of a way to pick the best people to save lives.

In case you haven’t heard of the case from New Haven, Connecticut, the Christian Science Monitor reports:

At issue in Ricci v. DeStefano is whether city officials in New Haven, Conn., acted legally when they threw out the results of a promotion exam because no black candidates scored high enough to be considered for a management job.

Officials said they were worried that black applicants might file a discrimination lawsuit against the city if they went ahead and promoted the white and Hispanic firefighters who scored well on the exam.

Instead, the test results for all candidates were thrown out. As a result, in 2004, the high-scoring white and Hispanic firefighters sued for discrimination, claiming they would have been promoted to lieutenant and captain positions if they were African-American.

Last night I caught Hardball with Chris Matthews, in which Matthews engaged in a discussion on the topic with Pat Buchanan and Salon’s Joan Walsh. Walsh stated:

There’s a reason that we have these ugly cases and that’s the failure of our politics to really resolve some of these ugly conflicts. We have fire departments all over this country, God bless them, that are still disproportionately not just white, but Irish Catholic. You know, my home of San Francisco is that way, and here in New York today its majority of New Yorkers are black or Latino, and only ten percent are firefighters. What’s happened in a lot of these cases, Chris, is that these Irish Catholic dominated unions have really fought efforts to make the tests more fair.

Obviously for Walsh, her use of the phrase “make the test more fair”—which should probably be “fairer”—is a way of saying that you need to administer the test until the candidates whom you want to pass, do pass.

Matthews went on to say that if try-outs are held for a basketball team, and the best players all happen to be from the same ethnic group, that the try-outs aren’t flawed—it’s just that the people who won at the try-outs were the best and beat everyone else. To that Walsh responded by saying, “Public sector jobs are a very different animal from a sports team.”

How Ms. Walsh has arrived at this idea has me puzzled. Both a sports team and a fire department/rescue squad are expected to deliver results. Athletes are expected to help their team win; firefighters are expected to accomplish things that can’t be accomplished by anyone and everyone—and in most cases, peoples’ lives hang in the balance. Just because one has a payroll derived from the private sector while the other comes from tax dollars does not make the rewarding of the jobs different. In both you must perform; you’re not “better” because of your skin color.

It’s absolutely preposterous that Joan Walsh would view a field like emergency services as one in which political correctness is more important than clear-cut ability. Suppose Walsh is in a house fire or car crash; is she going to refuse rescue and treatment from the fire-rescue squad and paramedics if their skin isn’t a certain color?

It’s sad that Walsh has taken something like a life-saving occupation and turned it into something superficial in which we should push an ideological agenda.

I can promise that if I ever need the help from a firefighter, paramedic, or police officer that I won’t stop him/her from saving me if I’m burning, bleeding, or being shot at just because they might not be from a particular ethnic group.

References

Hardball with Chris Matthews. MSNBC / YouTube. 5 May 2009.

Richey, Warren. “Supreme Court to Hear Reverse-Discrimination Case.” Christian Science Monitor. 21 Apr. 2009. <screenshot>

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