And of course, the city of New Haven is better served by first-generation firefighters with no access to networks and advice than by persons raised to the purple -- in families with a willingness to die for their fellow man. Or woman. Or transgender.
Next, the civil rights industry will sue to have the children of parents with high IQs graded on a negative curve in school -- "handicapping" will deduct a grade for every 10 points of parental IQ above the lowest parental score in the commoonity. /sarc
It is indeed sad. The defenders of modern racism are more interested in making the results race neutral than in making laws and systems race neutral (that is to say, entirely blind to the very concept of race, which is the classically liberal ideal to which I ascribe). Apparently if doctor A is assessed in every capacity as being more highly qualified than doctor B, it is possible for someone to remain (in popular estimation) both sane and moral by rejecting doctor A and accepting doctor B by virtue of skin tone differences.
When I taught students years ago, I never really cared why grades were higher for one group than for the other - some of my colleagues collected their own statistics and made attempts to ameliorate performance inequality (this is for mathematics, and we all know how much bigotry hides within differential equations and calculus), but I could not care less.
The Greek organizations, because of a supposed membership differential weighted toward white males, were always a target of ire (for their collections of prior year tests). Sometimes professors would change the context of questions, getting rid of questions about concepts that only white males have lifestyle familiarity with. Like nuclear decay rates?? Springs and pulleys? Fastfood queues? Fencing a yard? Perhaps they took questions predicated on the social equivalent of subtracting payroll taxes from a paycheck, and replaced them with questions they think that students from a “diverse background” have lifestyle familiarity with. Nope, that is not racist at all...just like replacing cars with shopping carts in examples to better appeal to the sensibilities of women is not sexist. Welcome to the world of leftist delusion.
If I teach grade 1, 10, or even graduate students, am I supposed to hire a diversity consultant to screw with all my tests because kids from certain groups are X% less likely to take part in kindergarten? Or because their mother was Y% more likely to drink alcohol during pregnancy? Or because growing up in a violent neighborhood makes childhood trips to the library a particularly risky proposition?
Seriously, it is not the job of performance evaluators to “correct” or “compensate” for the sins of the past or for injustices due to genuine racism today. I can accept that some scenarios can “lock in” institutional discrimination (such as older European-style advancement systems predicated explicitly upon parentage and blind to all concepts of individual merit), but even in such blatant cases the answer is not to water down or otherwise corrupt performance evaluation procedures in hopes of “compensating”.
According to the records for this particular case, the strongest argument made by the dissenting justices was that there was delayed access for some of the study materials due to a deficiency of the publisher, with this presumably offering an advantage to those who could retrieve the materials instead from friends or relatives, and thus self-perpetuating the inequality put in place when laws were openly discriminatory. So let us examine this more closely. According to the dissent, this delay entailed waiting “several weeks” to obtain copies of the study materials. Again according to the dissent, the announcement of the performance evaluation more than a year earlier gave the committee plenty of time to seek outside counsel on test composition and weight. So, from Ginsberg’s lashing out against the test preparers for not hiring enough diversity consultants to turn the test into complete shit, we learn that everyone who was experienced enough to conceivably enter into competition for the promotion had more than a year to prepare, and more than a year to buy the study materials. Yet a delay of weeks (meaning 3 weeks or less, or the justices would have certainly used “months” for added effect) is partly blamed for performance inequality.
In the minds of many, one cannot both accept that the outcome of the performance evaluation was fair, and that there exist no intrinsic racial differences responsible for differences in performance. This is fallacious, and represents the sort of false dichotomy leveraged successfully for decades by the Left (and parts of the “Right” in matters of foreign policy) to trick people into accepting the preposterous. One can submit that differences expressing themselves along racial lines have origins independent of genetic factors, while at the same time demanding that the evaluation of performance remain dispassionate, even when the results furnish inequality. Genes may of course play a role, and I do not subscribe to the view that with enough effort anyone can do anything, but ultimately the only objective measure we should respect is one based on merit at time of impact, even if that exposes the underlying fruit of yesterday’s (or today’s) injustices which influenced the initial trajectory. If we bury those sins with have measures, than all we have succeeded in is a backhanded condoning the root practices responsible for inequality, and a self-serving painting over of history.
Minorities should be infuriated with attempts to “soften the blow of racism” by using yet more racism. Liberalism has gone from extolling the virtues of the individual to extinguishing both the individual and virtue by feigning an equivalence between negative and positive, and by supplanting the one with the collective.