This article doesn’t make any sense. The judges delivered their ruling. That’s judicial activity — in effect, what judges are paid to do — not judicial activism.

Ruben, are you a lawyer? If you are a lawyer, then the problem is that most of your readers look at the Ricci case with an eye to the human moral implications, not jurisprudence; in other words, most people think what the city of New Haven did was wrong, regardless of whatever sophisticated legal arguments emerge from either side.

If you are not a lawyer, then stop trying to argue like one. There were ample lawyers involved in this case and it went through several different levels of review. The highest court in the land rendered a verdict. End of story. If you want to talk about the case, talk about it as a writer and wordsmith. Discuss it in the way that we laymen care about — is it wrong? Have things changed so that these affirmative action measures no longer make sense? Etc. Don’t descend into jargon you don’t have the expertise to tease out.

Ruben, can you please stop writing about race? You’re becoming a one-note Charlie. It’s painful for me, as a Latino, to have to watch another smart Latino men reduce himself to his race and ethnic background. You are much more than that. Write about other things.

And stop beating the dead horse that is Sotomayor. Even if you think the conservatives are out of line regarding her, the liberals control the whole process in Washington and they are the ones needing greater critique and scrutiny from writers like you. Invest your energies where they are needed.

Ciao,
Robert O. Lopez

First, the author seems to think that because conservatives discourage a victim mentality that they are opposed to any and all lawsuits based on race discrimination. That is not my experience. Instead the “victim-mentality” objection is two fold. First, we grieve that our brothers and sisters among historically discriminated-against groups become so discouraged that they allow the fear of racism and bigotry to hold them back more than bigotry actually restrains them. Second, we object to those who see everything through a racial prism. a prime example of that is when Pete King denounced Michael Jackson as a pedophile and the ultimate race hustler Al Sharpton claimed this was racist somehow.

Second, this article is factually wrong. Contrary to what the author thinks, if Griggs was ever designed to set such a low bar for racial discrimination such as what we saw in Ricci, then it was already overturned, to a degree, by the Civil Rights Act of 1991. That statute specifically stated that the courts were not to require a quota. And yet the city of new haven, for no other reason than the fact that too many white people did too well on their test, wanted to scrap the test. A victory for new haven would have accomplished in fact what the statute forbade: a requirement that cities and employers throw out every test that didn’t achieve certain quotas for black success. There could be nothing less activist than to make sure that every word of a statute is given force and meaning.

And the worst thing about the liberal position on the subject is that it is lazy. I believe that talent is evenly distributed among the races in all areas including fire fighting. I also believe that NH did everything humanly possible to make the test fair according to race. So, bluntly, while I think potential is evenly distributed, I think actual expertise and achievement is not, yes, because of larger forces in society. And as much as we might lament that reality, the fact is that those firefighters who scored the best were probably the best. And when your house is burning down, you don’t want a firefighter who would have been great but for the effects of bigotry; you want one who is great now.

And rather than taking the cheap and easy way out of promoting people who are not yet great firefighters, what new haven should have done was find out why those black firefighters who had the potential to be great were not achieving that potential. And then, figuring out what the problem is, they should have affirmatively worked to develop that potential so that rather than papering over the present deficiencies by a defacto quota, instead they actually made the black firefighters equal.

I will add that in Sotomayor’s short sighted desire to push these defacto quotas, she rubber stamped a lower court decision that actually dismantled much of the law against racial discrimination. The lower court had said that no racial discrimination occurred, in part, because no one received a promotion. You got that? So if next time they throw out the test because “too many n—-rs did too well so they had to have cheated” that precedent would tell us that no discrimination occurred at all. Even most conservatives would say that was hooey.

Statistical evidence, in the case pass rate of blacks, does NOT automatically prove disparate impact. Plaintiffs must also prove that screening methods are not job related and a business necessity.

Also notice that he leaves some “minor” factoids out of this.

* DeStefano is good buddies with Rev. Boise Kimber, another Sharpton clone. New Haven has a lot of blacks and Kimber helped Stefano win elections

* The test was developed by an independant agency specifically to be job-related and avoid bias. The agency was more than willing to defend the validity of their test in court.

* Sotomayor threw out the case without even authoring an opinion

I guess according to dolts like Rueven New Haven should just keep having tests and throwing them out until they got the desired results. But then wouldn’t that be like having hard racial quotas which are patently illegal?

L’Chaim!