affirmativeaction
Jim Webb’s Anti-Immigrant Rant
originally posted by Jamilah King for Colorlines [click here]
Jul 26th
Sen. Jim Webb’s back with another rant against affirmative action. In case you missed it, the Virgina politician took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal late last week to tackle the “myth of white privilege,” and while it has provoked the usual rage and skepticism in some corners, the general consensus seems to be that folks are over it.
First, Webb’s argument: poor white folks exist, too. And they’re not all the same. But they’re still often overlooked because everyone who’s not white benefits from government entitlement programs, namely immigrants of color:
The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”–especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.–moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans, who despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.
Charing Ball at The Atlanta Journal Constitution calls Webb’s particular brand of white, citizenship-having angst a perfectly timed throwback to Southern strategy politics. Nothing like touching on the deep-seeded racial anxieties of whites and blacks during a recession to get a few votes. After all, it’s not like immigrants of color are exactly riding the rails of American privilege these days.
Between the Shirley Sherrod scandal and the Tea Party trading jabs with the NAACP over who’s more racist, this summer’s shaping up as a hot house for regressive public debate. All Webb’s op-ed proved is the obvious: that we’re missing out on having productive conversations on race and racism.
Photo: Creative Commons/Rob Shenk
Supreme Court Keeps Firefighters’ Civil Rights Claim Alive
May 25th
Once again, a city fire department is in the hot seat for employment discrimination and prompting the Supreme Court to set crucial precedents for civil rights law. This time, thousands of Black firefighters in Chicago got the green light from the Supreme Court to broaden the scope of their civil rights claim despite having passed a deadline to do so.
In contrasting the ruling with the Lily Ledbetter gender-discrimination case–in which the court upheld time limits on claims–the New York Times editorial board predicts:
If interpreted properly by the lower courts, the ruling could give a chance at relief to minority groups, women, the elderly the disabled and others claiming to be victims of a discriminatory employment practice long after the practice went into effect.
The case, Lewis v. City of Chicago, centered on a controversial firefighter test that systematically excluded candidates of color over a number of years. The main issue was not the discriminatory “disparate impact,” which a lower court already ruled on, but the time limits attached to the case. The high court ruled that test takers could take legal action against the racially biased test even after a technical deadline for bringing claims had passed.
The immediate impact of the decision will be local, affecting several thousand firefighter candidates, who may be entitled to remedies including the hiring of about 120 Black candidates and millions in damages. But Lewis adds another crease to the bizarre patchwork of legal and political opinions surrounding the Civil Rights Act in the 21st century.
Last year, in Ricci v. DeStefano, a sharply divided bench sided with a group of mostly white firefighters who challenged the city’s decision to invalidate test results that excluded Blacks. Right-wing critics of the city decried the consequences of “political correctness,” while defenders of affirmative action stressed the need to hold government agencies accountable for compensating for racial inequities in the civil service.
The “disparate impact” argument in Chicago turned on arbitrary cut-offs in a written test given to 26,000 aspiring firefighters in 1995. Fran Spielman at the Sun-Times explains that in siphoning the test results:
the city established a cut-off score of 89 and hired randomly from the top 1,800 “well-qualified” candidates…. In 2005, a federal judge ruled that the city’s decision had the effect of perpetuating the predominantly white status quo, since 78 percent of those “well-qualified” candidates were white.
Although there is a standard 300-day window for filing civil rights cases in response to an act of discrimination, Spielman continues, “African-American firefighters maintained — and the Supreme Court agreed — that a new act of discrimination occurred every time the scores were used to hire firefighters between May, 1996 and October, 2001.”
Writing for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, no friend of affirmative action, stated that while test itself was the initial discriminatory act, “it does not follow that no new violations occurred – and no new claims could arise–when the city implemented that decision down the road.”
While the Court’s decision to uphold time limits in Ledbetter eventually prompted Congress to pass corrective legislation, the Lewis ruling appears to broaden channels for redress in the courts. Either way, it may be worth revisiting the reflections of New York University sociologist Dalton Conley on trying to litigate our way to equal opportunity. After the Ricci decision, he wrote that in the face of entrenched racial divides pervading America’s public institutions—
Expecting a single test to compensate for all that is unrealistic — silly even. This is a symptom of a larger pathology in the American psyche where our deep and abiding belief in meritocracy clashes with our culture of individualism: We expect testing (and schools) to do the work of social policy when it can’t really carry that heavy a load.
But policymakers, for their part, have been less than eager to take on that load. So for now, in Chicago and beyond, the people weighed down by generations of discrimination have no choice but to look to the courts to lessen their burden.
Photo credit: Creative Commons/Brett Gustafson