It mayremind some of us old enough to remember of the machinations andcontrivances of Southern white officials and agitators employed toprevent blacks from registering and voting.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the case of theNew Haven firefighters, was a ringing endorsement of the Civil RightsAct of 1964’s ban on racial discrimination and a repudiation of SupremeCourt nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s decision in the Second Circuit U.S.Court of Appeals. While five justices flatly rejected Sotomayor’sruling, even the four dissenters wouldn’t have let stand her rulingallowing the results of a promotion exam to be set aside because noblack firefighter had a top score.
Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in politicalsociology, thanks to the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. Itshows how a combination of vote-hungry politicians and local politicalagitators — you might call them community organizers — worked withthe approval of elite legal professionals like Sotomayor to employracial quotas and preferences in defiance of the words of the CivilRights Act.
One of the chief actors was the Rev. Boise Kimber, a supporter ofMayor John DeStefano. The mayor testified for him as a characterwitness in a 1996 trial in which he was convicted of stealing prepaidfuneral expenses from an elderly woman. DeStefano later appointedKimber the head of the board of fire commissioners, but Kimber resignedafter saying he wouldn’t hire certain recruits because “they just havetoo many vowels in their name.”
After the results of the promotion test were announced, showing that19 white and one Hispanic firefighter qualified for promotion, Kimbercalled the mayor’s chief administrative officer opposing certificationof the test results.
The record shows that DeStefano and his appointees went to work,holding secret meetings and concealing their motives, to get the CivilService Board to decertify the test results. Kimber appeared at a boardmeeting and made “a loud, minutes-long outburst” and had to be ruledout of order three times.
City officials ignored the inconvenient fact that they had hired anindependent and experienced firm — this is a thriving business — todraw up a bias-free test and paid a competing firm to draw up anothertest. Its head testified that the first firm’s test was biased withoutseeing it. The board capitulated and decertified the test. DeStefanowas prepared to overrule it if it had gone the other way.
Such is governance these days in a liberal university town. It mayremind some of us old enough to remember of the machinations andcontrivances of Southern white officials and agitators employed toprevent blacks from registering and voting.
This is the sort of thing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described inthe text as just the workings of politics. Writing in Slate, Yale Lawfaculty member Emily Bazelon goes further. She laments that thepromotion test rewarded memorization and that it favored “‘fire buffs’– guys who read fire suppression manuals on their down time.”
She is outraged that a fire department might want to promotefirefighters who know more about suppressing fires, rescuing victimsand protecting their colleagues rather than simply promote apredetermined number of members of specific racial groups whoseself-appointed political spokesmen back the politicians in office.
Bazelon and Sotomayor, who voted to uphold the city’sdecertification of the promotion test, are typical of liberal eliteswho are ready to ratify squalid political deals — and blatant racialdiscrimination — in return for the political support and the votesthat can be rallied by the likes of Kimber. You supply the numbers onElection Day, and we’ll supply the verbiage to put a pretty label onyour shenanigans.
Usually the people who are hurt by this are not as sympathetic asFrank Ricci, the dyslexic firefighter who paid a friend $1,000 to readthe training manuals and studied hard enough to get the highest scoreon the test.
But I think we ought to reserve some of our sympathy for thepurported beneficiaries of this wretched discrimination, the blackfirefighters. Their champions — Kimber and DeStefano, Bazelon andSotomayor — are telling them that their way up in life should not bedetermined by the content of their character or by mastery of theirworthy craft, but by the color of their skin. Not by a fair andunbiased test, but by dishonest wire-pulling and threats of politicalretaliation.
Thanks to Justice Alito, for pulling back the curtain and showing the ugly reality of racial discrimination in America today.