Checking The Right Boxes
Given last November’s election result, qualifications obviously have little relevance any more.
And why not? What do qualifications, y’know, those certificates of education, achievement and intelligence, actually tell us about someone that we cannot infer from that person’s smile, charisma and, dare I say it, skin color?
Quite a bit, now you mention it.
How can anyone deny that meritocratic systems work best? If it just so happens that every single lawyer at a given firm is white (or black or anything else), middle-aged and male, but are also all better qualified than anyone else, then I’ve no problem with it.
Ditto politics, business, teaching and everything else. No other consideration, social engineering included, should trump the ability to do the job.
In fact, why don’t we try an experiment with the next set of elections? What would be the result if voters were not given names, photographs or any other personal information about candidates, only their concrete record of achievements?
No doubt that, too, would somehow be construed as racist.
So that this post isn’t entirely theoretical, the US Supreme Court last week heard arguments in the case of Ricci v DeStefano, brought by a group of 20 firefighters (19 white and one Hispanic) against the city of New Haven, CT.
118 firefighters took exams in 2003 for promotion to the ranks of lieutenant and captain.
When the results for the 15 vacancies came in, 14 of the top-scoring applicants were white and one was Hispanic. No African-Americans (out of 27 who sat the tests) scored highly enough.
Uh-oh. Big problem.
The solution?
Clearly the most reasonable response, therefore, was to deny promotions to everyone. Which the city of New Haven promptly did.
But here’s the thing: when the most qualified people are denied positions that they’ve earned, we all suffer.
I’m weeping inside that this even needs to be stated.
[Cross-posted at No Quarter.]
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