‘To Argue the Essential Weakness of His Own People’

Last month, a federal judge ruled that New York City’s Fire Department (FDNY) discriminated against blacks and Hispanics with its recruitment exam. The court contended that paper-and-pencil tests given from 1999 to 2007 unfairly excluded minority recruits. (Source)

In plain-speak, it means blacks and Hispanics performed disproportionately poorly on the exam.

In 2007, the Department of Justice filed a suit against 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.

At the time, the black firefighter’s group claimed that “the SAT-style test has little to do with fighting fires and has prevented many black and Latino applicants from getting the jobs they deserve.”

I’m reminded of an article author Shelby Steele wrote a decade ago about a racial preferences debate between the American Civil Rights Institute‘s Ward Connerly and law professor Christopher Edley on C-SPAN. In Harper’s Magazine via (CIR-USA.org), Steele lamented over what he called the “disappearance of the black individual.” A black Harvard student rose to “challenge” Connerly during the question and answer period. Steele writes (emphasis added):

“Now consider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that black Americans simply cannot compete without preferences. If his own forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper-and-pencil standardized tests.”

This is one of the many things that bother me about preferences. They require, in no uncertain terms, lowering standards for blacks. Proponents must argue—like the cocky black Harvard student—that blacks cannot and should not be expected to compete with whites or held to the same standards. Individuality is erased, and group entitlements emerge.

Preference proponents implicitly make the case, despite their purported support for racial equality, that equality is not what they really want. Special treatment is the goal, disguised behind euphemisms like diversity.

There was a time that black America believed in individuality and longed to be treated as free men and women. Today, it’s the opposite. Once people realized how advantageous it was to re-assert group membership, the importance of the individual was minimized. Those who try to assert their individuality over racial group membership must face the Uncle-Tom-epithet consequences.

“[T]here is another ‘little gulag’ for the black individual,” Steele writes, “He lives in a society that needs his race for the good it wants to do more than it needs his individual self. His race makes him popular with white institutions and unifies him with blacks. But he is unsupported everywhere as an individual. Nothing in his society asks for or even allows his flowering as a full, free, and responsible person. As is always the case when ‘the good’ becomes ascendant over freedom, and coercion itself becomes a good thing, the individual finds himself in a gulag.”