So, the federal government is “decreeing” the wording of an employment ad for a CITY in the STATE of Arkansas...
Folks, this is symptomatic of the problem in this country.
The cry of “no taxation without representation” was not about taxes, it was about local control and self-governance.
“When in the course of human events” time.
Yep...you have it exactly right. It likely stemmed from a lawsuit of some kind back in the 80’s between the DOJ and the City of North Little Rock. There were probably lawsuits like this filed all over the country at the time by the usual suspects(the ACLU et al).
Hard to believe they are still obligated to do it after this much time though.
In all fairness, there was a lot of hard core racism in the hiring process at that time. Also, I would not have been hired if the consent decree hadn't been in place, although I placed in the top two on the written test out of a couple of thousand applicants. I'm 5' 6", and previously the department had required that applicants be at least 5' 10".
Sooooooo... dear Freepers, I have benefited from affirmative action. The height requirement was thrown out because it violated Fed guidelines that said requirements could only be based on the actual performance requirements of the job. I suppose I could complain about some of these rulings, but I owe my career of 31 years (so far) to one of them. If the height requirement hadn't been thrown out, I would have moved on down the road to something else.
I know nothing of the case that resulted in the consent decree, but I bet it went something like this:
Some black applied for a job and didn't get it. Qualification for the job is irrelevant. Then he noticed that blacks are in those jobs with a lower percentage than the demographics. That person filed suit or complained to the feds on federal civil rights grounds stating (like Sotomayor thinks) that such disparity is conclusive evidence of race/sex discrimination, the possibility of a lack of qualified blacks in the population never being considered. Faced with spending millions to defend itself the city, which previously hired only based on qualifications, signed the consent decree to make it go away.
Let's say a population is 50% black. Let's say that a normal number whites in that population are high school or college grads. Let's also say that half the blacks in that population live in a 'hood' and never finished high school. Your real pool of qualified applicants isn't 50/50 white/black, but more like 67/33. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't reflect the racial demographics, so the hiring authority must be racist.
There's also just the matter of certain groups tending to be interested in certain jobs, or not. I'd hate to have to fill software development positions with PC requirements. My guesstimate of the developers I've worked with or around is 98% male, 80% white, 14% Asian/Indian, 2% Persian/Arab, 2% black (I've never worked in an H1B shop, so that doesn't skew my sampling even more towards Asians). I've noticed somewhat higher female representation for system administrators, but still nowhere close to 50/50.