American Civil Rights Institute Blog

Attorneys for New York City have asked that Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis be removed from the case that-shall-never-end for bias against white firefighters.

Garaufis appointed an independent monitor to oversee FDNY’s efforts to increase so-called diversity in the department, which the judge called “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege.” About four million of the city’s eight million people identify as racial minorities, but blacks and Hispanics account for only nine percent of firefighters. This, according to liberals, is a tragedy for which the city should lower standards and hire based on race.

In 2007, the Department of Justice under George W. Bush filed suit against the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) for violating the Civil Rights Act, claiming that two pass-fail written exams and the rank ordering process disparately impacted minorities and weren’t job-related or consistent with business necessity. The Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black FDNY firefighters, joined the lawsuit.

Two years later, Garaufis ruled that FDNY discriminated against blacks and Hispanics with a recruitment exam used between 1999 and 2007. The same judge later ruled that New York City intentionally discriminated against minorities by continuing to use the exam. The judge proposed that the department hire black and Hispanic applicants who scored lower than whites, and the city rejected it.

Merit Matters, a group that opposes race-based hiring in the fire department, filed an amicus brief (38 pages in PDF) in support of the city attorney’s brief.

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…euphemistically known as “affirmative action.”

When I first read about “What Happens After Enrollment: An Analysis of the Time Paths of Racial Difference in GPA and Major Choice (32 pages in PDF),” by Duke University economists Peter Arcidiacono and Esteban Aucejo and sociologist Ken Spenner, the results seemed intuitive to me. Students admitted with lesser credentials have a harder time handling the course work. It’s neither rocket science nor a great mystery.

According to the study, if the point of affirmative action is to identify “students with much potential but weak preparation, suggesting recipients should catch up to their more-prepared counterparts over time,” it hasn’t worked very well. The data reveal that white students enter with higher GPAs than black students. By senior year, the gap has narrowed. But the researchers attribute the shrunken gap to affirmative action students switching to “easier” majors as their academic careers progress. An excerpt:

“An initial glance at data from consecutive cohorts of students who first enrolled in 2001 and 2002 suggests that this catch up does occur. Namely, black students who completed college start out significantly behind their white counterparts in terms of grade point average but rapidly catch up. Figure 1 shows that differences in grades between black and white students during their first semester were almost half a grade. However, this disparity was reduced by almost fifty percent by the last semester of college.

“There are, however, at least two reasons to be skeptical of Figure 1: variance and course selection. With regard to variance, instructors use much less of the grade distribution in upper year courses. Indeed, the standard deviation of grades for second-semester seniors is 86% percent of the standard deviation of grades for first-semester freshmen. For convergence to occur, it is therefore important to examine differences in class rank over time rather than GPA levels.

“The second concern is course selection. Grading standards differ wildly across majors at Duke (see Johnson 1997, 2003), with similar differences seen across many universities (see Sabot and Wakeman-Linn 1991, Grove and Wasserman 2004 and Koedel 2011). In particular, natural science, engineering, and economics classes have average grades that are 8% lower than the average grades in humanities and social science classes. Note that these averages do not take into account selection into courses: average SAT scores of natural science, engineering, and economic majors are over 50 points higher than their humanities and social science counterparts. Although blacks and whites initially have similar interests regarding whether to major in the more strictly graded fields, the patterns of switching result in 68% of blacks choosing humanities and social science majors compared to less than 55% of whites. We show that accounting for these two issues can explain virtually all the convergence of black white grades.”

As expected, racial preferences supporters are crying foul, as if protesting objective data will somehow change it. According to the Associated Press, study author Arcidiacono was “surprised” by the negative reaction from blacks, who said he wanted to “show the need to find ways to keep minorities in difficult majors such as the natural sciences, economics and engineering.” For all his well meaning intentions…I guess he didn’t get the memo. Any attempt to shine light on the issue, regardless of intentions, makes one the enemy of “progress.” We’re not supposed to talk about it or examine it. Just let it be because…well, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and “white privilege” and all the rest. That’s why the disparities between racial groups exist, and any suggestion otherwise gets one branded unfriendly toward progress.

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