One hundred firefighters were eligible to take the test; of those one hundred, 16 white firefighters and 1 Hispanic firefighter would have been eligible for promotion. (This is verifiable in multiple sources, by the way.) There was no recommendation, etc. -- it was a test. (And god, if it had been by recommendation as you said above, do you not see *that* as a problem? A group of mostly white firefighters being the only ones *recommended* for promotion?)
As to your second point -- being able to blindly accept that something like this is statistically possible is a function of privilege. The rest of us who are just as smart and capable as white men and used to being screwed over because we're women/transgendered/not white/differently-abled/or whatever it is they're looking for and routinely find in white men see it differently. The truth is that we can score just as well on tests and be just as qualified and *still* we don't get the jobs. You can see why we might be questioning this result, can't you?
And on point three: you're right -- it's not a long standing issue, but in this case the city refused to certify the test results, and instead threw them out to avoid a threatened discrimination lawsuit (on behalf of minority firefighters). If the test was as race-neutral as everyone is claiming, why not just certify the results and have done with it? In a city where 60% of the population is black, it's suspect when not one black makes the cut, and the city does something like this.
(As an aside -- your DW style makes it nearly impossible to make comments, as about a third of the comment box is covered by the sidebar. I had to go type this out elsewhere and c&p. Grr.)
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Date: 2009-06-29 11:55 pm (UTC)As to your second point -- being able to blindly accept that something like this is statistically possible is a function of privilege. The rest of us who are just as smart and capable as white men and used to being screwed over because we're women/transgendered/not white/differently-abled/or whatever it is they're looking for and routinely find in white men see it differently. The truth is that we can score just as well on tests and be just as qualified and *still* we don't get the jobs. You can see why we might be questioning this result, can't you?
And on point three: you're right -- it's not a long standing issue, but in this case the city refused to certify the test results, and instead threw them out to avoid a threatened discrimination lawsuit (on behalf of minority firefighters). If the test was as race-neutral as everyone is claiming, why not just certify the results and have done with it? In a city where 60% of the population is black, it's suspect when not one black makes the cut, and the city does something like this.
(As an aside -- your DW style makes it nearly impossible to make comments, as about a third of the comment box is covered by the sidebar. I had to go type this out elsewhere and c&p. Grr.)