[Bret L]

((Irony #1 is that there are plenty of blacks smart enough to be fire
captains and lieutenants, but _those_ blacks don't apply, because
instead of being fire officers they get to be VPs in corporations,
where they are over their heads and perform dismally. Affirmative
Action is a Peter Principle Amplifier-those 'favored' are doomed to be
promoted way over their competence. Irony #2 is that the black fire
fighters call themselves "Firebirds", a name somehow strangely
evocative of rednecks rather than blacks. The favored status of Trans
Ams in particular and Pontiacs in general amongst a certain subset of
hick peckerwoods is one, along with the similarity to the title of
that #1, All Time White Trash Anthem, "Freebird". Besides, there are
still older blacks who can recall the propensity for antiblack
hecklers in the 40s and 50s to sing that then-popular standard, "Bye
Bye Blackbird" at the most inopportune times. Bret.))

That Sotomayor Decision: One Law For Frank Ricci—Another For Emily
Bazelon?

By Steve Sailer

"This Monday, June 29, is supposed to be the day when we’ll find out if the Supreme Court overturns Sonia Sotomayor’s notorious decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. Sotomayor permitted New Haven to junk the results of its fire department promotional exams because too many whites had done well on them.

Last week, Slate ran a 5000 word article about the New Haven Fire
Department, The Ladder, by senior editor Emily Bazelon and intern
Nicole Allan. The article turns into an inadvertent reductio ad
absurdum of the Sotomayorian conventional wisdom.

Bazelon’s ultimate objection to New Haven’s discarded 2003 testing
process is that it wasn’t subjective and arbitrary enough to promote
as many minorities as she’s like. She ends her article with a ringing
call for a more random selection method that will produce less
knowledgeable fire captains and lieutenants:

"The city could come up with a measure for who is qualified for the
promotions, rather than who is somehow best. And then it could choose
from that pool by lottery."

Bazelon apparently doesn’t know that lotteries are exactly what cities
such as Chicago are already doing with the results of firefighter
tests, in an attempt to comply with the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission’s "Four-Fifths Rule". This regulation puts the burden of
proof in discrimination cases on employers when blacks aren’t hired or
promoted at least 80 percent as often as whites.

There’s a reason you don’t see much in the newspapers about cities
hiring firefighters by lottery: this method is terrifying to anybody
who might someday be trapped in a burning building. So politicians
don’t explain too vividly to the public what exactly they are up to.

In 2006, the new Chicago hiring test passed all but the bottom 15
percent of the folks who walked in off the street wanting jobs as
firefighters. And then, just as Bazelon recommends for New Haven, the
Chicago city government picked "randomly" from the top 85 percent—the
crème de la crème of the Disparate Impact Age.

Why did Chicago have to go so low?

You can use Microsoft Excel’s "Normdist" function to figure out how
low you must set the bar when drawing from "normally distributed"
populations to allow blacks to pass a test at the EEOC-mandated rate
of Four-Fifths as much as whites.

Assume whites average an IQ of 100 and blacks average one standard
deviation lower at 85. (Keep in mind that this model is useful not
just for IQ but for most valid cognitive predictors of job
performance.)

If you set the IQ cutoff at 100, then 16 percent of blacks and 50
percent of whites pass. Sixteen divided by fifty is only 32 percent,
or about One-Third, which doesn’t come close to meeting the EEOC Four-
Fifths regulation.

What about setting a minimum IQ of 85? That seems pretty low. Can you
get away with that minimal of a standard without the EEOC siccing the
burden of proof on you?

Answer: no. Unfortunately, an 85 IQ minimum means that 50 percent of
blacks and 84 percent of whites pass. That wouldn’t even meet a Three-
Fifths Rule, much less the Four-Fifths Rule.

Not until you cut the IQ bar down to 74 would the EEOC be truly happy:
77 percent of blacks and 96 percent of whites pass. Exactly Four-
Fifths!

But, seriously, what’s the point of even giving a test so easy that 96
percent of white people can pass? White people aren’t so smart that
somebody at the 5th percentile of the white bell curve is going to
make an adequate firefighter.

Bazelon’s lotteries are an incredibly stupid idea because cities end
up hiring incredibly stupid people of all races. My own opinion is
that, before matters come to this absurd pass, citizens would be much
safer if fire departments gave up and used explicit racial quotas.
Then at least fire departments could hire the top-scoring firefighters
from within each race.

Bazelon asks:

"Why Did New Haven's White Firefighters Test Better Than Blacks and
Hispanics?"

However, it never seems to occur to Bazelon to look at the countless
similar situations in which whites, on average, both out-test and out-
perform blacks and Hispanics. For example, New Haven’s own Yale Law
School makes intensive use of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). It
has a black-white gap comparable to the New Haven firefighter’s tests:
the median black law school hopeful would score at only the 12th
percentile among whites.

But the Yale Law School most definitely does not use a lottery to
randomly choose among all applicants whose LSATs are high enough for
them to become lawyers. Top-Law-Schools.com reports:

"Admissions to Yale Law School can be considered the most competitive
in the country based on the school's 7.3% admit rate alone. The oft-
cited 25th to 75th percentile ranges for admissions run around
3.77-3.97 (GPA) and 170-177 (LSAT). … On the flip side, an average of
3 students who had scored below 160 on the LSAT were admitted per
year, although an average of 937 students with comparable scores were
rejected each year."

Clearly, Yale Law School can’t choose by lottery because, well, it’s
Yale Law School, and it’s ever so important that it have an average
LSAT score at least as high as Harvard Law.

But the New Haven Fire Department should use a lottery because
rescuing people from burning buildings is for blue-collar lunkheads.
How much do you really have to know about saving lives anyway?

Seriously, the careful reader can figure out from Bazelon’s article
why New Haven’s white firemen averaged higher on the controversial
tests for leadership positions: Because, on the whole, they knew more
about how to fight fires.

And why did the whites know more?

In part, because they studied harder.

And, to Bazelon’s mind, that’s just not fair. Bazelon is much
exercised by the racial injustice inherent in white firefighters
knowing more about how to do their jobs. She says:

"Is this the best way to choose the leaders of a municipal fire
department—the best memorizers win?"

Worse, the white firemen are unjustly learning more about fire
fighting because they care more about fighting fires. Bazelon
continues:

"As one Hispanic quoted anonymously by the New Haven Independent put
it, the test favored ‘fire buffs’—guys who read fire-suppression
manuals on their downtime …"

To Bazelon, evidently, this is a bad thing.

By the way, here’s more from the original newspaper article
interviewing two Hispanic firefighters in New Haven:

"The pair contended that the real issue isn’t about race: Instead,
they argued that the way the test was designed favored ‘fire buffs’
who have spent their whole lives reading fire suppression manuals, and
studied like maniacs for the exam. Incidentally, most firefighters
matching that description happened to be white, they said. … Those who
aced the test were nerds who read fire-fighting books just for fun,
said Cordova’s cohort." [Latino Group Backs White Firefighters, by
Melissa Bailey, New Haven Independent, February 6, 2009]

In Bazelon’s utopia of racial equality, the whites would be just as
apathetic and uninformed about firefighting techniques as the
minorities are.

Moreover, Bazelon laments, some of the white firemen fight fires for
free in their spare time:

"Meanwhile, the [predominantly white] firefighters from the suburbs
are more likely to have experience as volunteer firefighters—which
gives them a leg up on skills when they apply for the job …"

The white firemen also are advantaged, Bazelon says, because they tend

"… to come from families in which firefighting is a legacy. … Frank
Ricci has an uncle and two brothers who are firefighters. He studied
fire science at college."

This annoys the Firebirds, the black firefighter’s association.
According to Bazelon,

"The Firebirds see the family ties of men like Heins and Ricci as part
of a network of influence that only white firefighters can tap into.
‘If you look at the history of the department there's a group of
folks, their fathers, their grandfathers, their uncles—they're all
part of this network,’ said Gary Tinney, the head of the Firebirds and
one of nine black lieutenants out of about 50 in the department."

In other words, the white firemen often grew up in households where
discussions of firefighting techniques were common around the kitchen
table. Sure, this means fewer New Havenites burn to death—but it’s
unjust to more ignorant firefighters.

I looked up "Emily Bazelon" on Wikipedia (accessed 16.59 ET, June 28
2009) and discovered that while she’s very bright, she’s not exactly
the most self-aware person. When read in light of her biography, her
Slate article about privileged white firemen becomes an amusing
epitome of unthinking Gown v. Town prejudice.

Wikipedia tells us:

"[Bazelon] graduated from Yale College in 1993 and from Yale Law
School in 2000."

After clerking for a federal judge, she pursued a career in law-
related journalism:

"Before joining Slate, Bazelon was a senior editor of Legal Affairs.
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post,
The Boston Globe, The New Republic as well as other publications. She
has worked as a reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area and as a
freelance journalist in Israel."

Now, she has a fellowship at Yale Law School:

"Bazelon is a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Truman Capote Fellow
for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School."

You might think that Bazelon would be better qualified to offer advice
on admissions and promotion to Yale Law School rather than to the New
Haven Fire Department. By Bazelon’s logic, Yale Law School should hire
by lottery. Perhaps—just to get the ball rolling—she could publicly
offer to give up her position to some randomly chosen person?

Moreover, this legal writer’s concern about the advantages Frank Ricci
garnered by being related to firemen seems a little ironic in light of
this Wikipedia line:

"She is the granddaughter of Judge David L. Bazelon and cousin of
feminist Betty Friedan."

Actually, as her 2005 Slate article Shopping with Betty suggests,
she’s more like the second cousin twice removed of the proto-feminist
(and crypto-communist) authoress of the bestselling Feminine Mystique.
Still, the two were fairly close despite their age difference.

More strikingly, the legal journalist’s grandfather David Bazelon was
the most powerful judge in America not on the Supreme Court when he
served from 1962-1978 as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia.

Indeed, considering his close relationship with the Svengali of the
Warren Court, William J. Brennan, quite possibly Bazelon was more
powerful than several Supreme Court Justices.

Needless to say, I’m not implying that Emily Bazelon’s career as a
writer on legal affairs has depended upon nepotism.

Rather, I’m pointing out that a family developing and passing on
expertise in a particular field—whether the Riccis in firefighting or
the Bazelons-Friedans in law and punditry—is a good thing for society
in general, because expertise is always in short supply.

Now tell me: why should we have one law for Frank Ricci and another
for Emily Bazelon?"

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090628_bazelon.htm