Posted on 04/23/2012 5:09:40 PM PDT by mandaladon
MIAMI (Reuters) - The Justice Department sued the city of Jacksonville, Florida, on Monday, claiming its use of written tests to determine promotions in the city's fire department discriminates against African-Americans.
The lawsuit followed a more than two-year investigation examining Jacksonville's record of promoting African-Americans for the ranks of lieutenant, captain, district chief and engineer dating back to 2004.
It came after a separate lawsuit filed last year by two dozen Jacksonville firefighters challenging the city's promotional process. In the lawsuit, the firefighters alleged union officials unfairly shared exam questions with white workers but not with black workers ahead of the test.
"This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices that have the effect of excluding qualified candidates on account of race will not be tolerated," Thomas Perez, a U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement.
A spokesman for the Jacksonville mayor's office declined to comment.
The complaint by the Justice Department alleges the exams are "not job related for the positions in question."
The complaint said use of the tests "has resulted in a disparate impact upon black candidates" because African-Americans pass the examinations at significantly lower rates than white candidates.
The Justice Department said black employees who do pass the tests rarely are promoted since their scores are generally lower than white workers.
"At best, these tests measure only a slice of what is necessary to be a supervisor, but they stand in the way of qualified African-Americans advancing in the fire department," the statement said.
The lawsuit also named the local firefighter's union, the Jacksonville Association of Firefighters Local 122, as a defendant since it negotiates the terms of promotion tests with the city.
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There is a reason that at every turn the race baiters have attacked written tests as racist and have systematically purged all forms of testing (especially IQ testing) from companies and government as a means of hiring and promotions. It’s because blacks are about 1 standard deviation lower than whites in intelligence and the only way you can achieve equality of out come is to ignore merit based hiring and promotions.
You can cry racist all day long about the above statement but when you get to areas of endeavor that are purely merit based the results speak for themselves. Look at the racial distribution of chess masters, or quantum physicists or any other area where raw brain power is the only entrance requirement and you’ll see what I mean. That’s also not to say that whites are at the top of the heap, Jews are about 1.5 standard deviations above whites in intelligence and Chinese/Indians are about 1/2 a standard deviation above whites. You’ll also notice that women will have a different distribution than men (although the mean may be the same) with men having a wider distribution than women which means that much more men will be at both the very top end and bottom end than women, which is again the case for these top end endeavors.
So unless you show me proof (like a video of some union thug slipping whitey the test answers) this is just the race hustling pimps at it again to the detriment of our safety in this case as if they have their way you will end up with unqualified guys/gals in positions that could get people killed. But that’s nothing new as they’ve been shoving women into the fire department based on nothing other than they are women, even though physically they are not qualified to do the job. I would rather see blacks hired as firemen than women even though they may not be qualified to move up the ranks as physically they can do the job whereas women cannot.
Wait. Wait just a frickin second. The basis of the lawsuit is you failed to help me cheat as you did with the others? Is that the argument here?? You not just failed to let me cheat, you failed to help me cheat?
Good Lord, help us!
It is also interesting that the Justice Department's problem with the process is that the written test is discriminatory simply based on it being a written test.
Shouldn't that be "other whites"? Most Jews are whites, and I think the Jews who have won special distinction for their intellectual achievements (Nobel Prizes, etc.) have mostly if not entirely descended from European Jews.
“Shouldn’t that be “other whites”?”
Nope, they are a separate race. Most likely reason for the high IQ is that you are looking at natural selection over a 2000 year period of persecution by whatever host nation they were living in. Only the very smart survived or so it seems.
I get a kick out of these white supremacist that think they are the “master race”, when you really look at it that title really should go to the Chinese and Indians as both of those races have whites beat in both IQ and population. And really in the end, it’s all about who makes the next generation and as far as I can see that is not the white race.
100 years ago the term "race" had a different meaning--on the ships' manifests at Ellis Island it is the equivalent of "ethnic group."
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