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"They should be suing the school systems that failed to properly prepare these job candidates for life in the real world."

No, they should be suing the brothers in their neighborhoods who beat down the black child that studied or got good grades, since such behavior is considered "acting white". In certain social groups, if you work hard and achieve you are acting white. If you slack and fail, then you have street cred.

It seems that it is more important for some people to remain in their situation with their rep intact than to work hard in school and be successful. Then we hear that it is the white man or the system or the competency test that is oppressing the black man. If he failed a competency test, was he not oppressed by his own behavior, his own failure to achieve, and the prevailing attitude in his own community?

This action suggests that the city is wrong in requiring potential employees to meet a minimum competency level. Do we want firefighters who can't operate complex machinery because they don't understand it? Will the next step be to require the city to purchase special versions of equipment geared toward those underachieving groups? Will the city then be sued because these special versions of equipment are not as effective? Will the city then be sued because those underachieving groups that were issued the special equipment feel discriminated against? Will the city then discard their complex equipment so as not to offend the underachievers? Will we be fighting fires with water buckets?

If we can require acceptance of firefighters that can't pass compentency tests, why not pilots and doctors? Why not engineers? Perhaps we can at least request some sort of rating system to identify the compentency level of the engineer who designed the bridge we are about to drive on. Or would that be discriminatory? If we hold no standards, we can set no expectations on outcomes.

Being politically correct is being intellectually dishonest for the sake of someone's feelings. I think we do a great disservice by ignoring the real issue here.