Sotomayor's patronizing attitude toward blacks

Cathy Young:

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Ricci, who is dyslexic, had to work extra hard to pass the test. He quit a second job so that he could study up to 13 hours a day. In addition to spending $1,000 on the recommended textbooks, he paid extra to have them read on audiotape. Other plaintiffs also paid money and sacrificed time with their families to study for the promotion.

At the hearing, Judge Sotomayor suggested that the test in question was arbitrary and that the city could have devised "a fair test" to measure job-related knowledge without producing a disproportionate failure rate among minorities. But, as an attorney for the plaintiffs pointed out, the city had actually hired an expert to ensure that the test was both fair and valid as a job qualification measurement. African-American fire department officials were also consulted.

Yet, according to Judge Sotomayor, the test is unacceptable if it "is always going to put a certain group at the bottom of the pass rate so they're never ever going to be promoted." That's a startlingly pessimistic assessment of black candidates' chances.

Writing in The New Republic last April, the outstanding black writer and scholar John McWhorter argues that, due to cultural differences, blacks are less likely than white or Asian Americans to grow up in an environment where writing and reading skills are emphasized. Yet McWhorter also asserts that, if Frank Ricci could overcome the effects of a cognitive disability, African-Americans can surely overcome the effects of cultural disadvantage. To expect any less and to perpetuate the notion that tests involving mental aptitude are unfair to blacks, he says, is "nonsensical at best and gruesome at worst."

There is an increasingly popular though hotly contested theory that minorities' test performance is often negatively affected by "stereotype threat," anxiety generated by the belief that members of one's group do badly on such tests. If this is true, then claims that standardized tests are biased against blacks or that blacks should be held to lower standards until the legacy of racism can be fixed (openly articulated by some commenters on McWhorter's article on the New Republic website) can only aggravate the problem.

The issue of racial preferences is surrounded by a great deal of obfuscation. Defenders of such policies commonly assert that outlawing race- and gender-based preferential treatment in education, hiring, and public services would mean an end to outreach and training programs designed to help minorities and women advance. But extra encouragement for underrepresented groups is hardly the same thing as outright discrimination against members of the majority. If New Haven city officials had instituted an outreach program to help more African-Americans pass the firefighter promotion test, a lawsuit from disgruntled whites would have found no support except on the racist fringe. Ricci and his fellow plaintiffs, on the other hand, have a strong case that, apart from its legal merits, appeals to most Americans' sense of justice.

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Sotomayor might have had a better argument if the blacks who underperformed on the test had put in the same time and effort as Ricci. There is no evidence I have seen that they did. Ricci is making the argument that he did well on the test because of his own efforts which were greater than the efforts of others and that is what we should be rewarding when it comes to promotions. That is an argument that the court should respect. Sotomayor's failure to see that should be a problem for her and the Democrats who support her.