Yesterday a reader commented on a post I'd written which discussed Sotomayor's decision in the Ricci case, which has now been overturned by the Supreme Court.
Keith wrote:
Let's see.....a bunch of people whose job it is to save lives take a written test as a major part of their promotion process. All these people work at the same job and have the exact same access to study materials as the others. In other words they are 100% equal at this point with the possible exception of seniority in the department.
The test scores are tabulated and as luck would have it mostly whites scored the highest. New Haven scrapped the test.
Now, had it been that mostly blacks scored the highest no one would have cared.
That's racism right there.
So instead New Haven is most likely going to rewrite the test with the result of "dumbing it down" so those who typically would have been weeded out will be allowed to pass.
Inferior and deadly.
Sotomayors decision was 100% racist in this case. She simply sided with the blacks that there was not enough representation. Sotomayors decision was also 100% stupid in this case in that she wholly ignored the law.
As for her whole "white man bad, latina good" malarkey we happen to live in a country founded upon the concept of the Rule of Law. Justice is blind woman for a reason. As soon as you start taking into account skin color and other racial markers into your decision making process you effectively start playing favoritism and this is 100% why Sotomayor must not ever be given a bench on the USSC.
Like so many other conservatives, Keith is grossly uninformed -- which is a state encouraged by right wing media like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, etc -- who ignore the underlying law behind Sotomayor's decision and focus on the color of her skin to make a race-based case against her Supreme Court nomination.
Yes -- in fact it's the law that if all things were equal and whites scored high and blacks didn't under the current law the test gets thrown out.
The law that applies says that there must be bias built into the test if race is a determining fact in the outcome.
Keith stated that the black applicants were in this case equally qualified and experienced, etc. Obviously there is something wrong with the test if equally qualified people score differently based on their race. It isn't racism, it's the law, that under those circumstances the test is scrapped.
Yesterday a conservative majority of the Supreme Court rewrote the law.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act speaks to equal pay for men and women of all colors. And yes, if race is a determining factor in the results -- if equally qualified blacks score lower than their equally qualified white counterparts, the test should be thrown out.
Conservatives don't see it that way -- when white people benefit from the biased test. Had the results gone the opposite way, and blacks scored higher than equally qualified white applicants then these racists would be screaming long and hard that the test was biased.
In their efforts to make a race-based case against Sotomayor, conservatives are using their own racism as a club, The "disparate treatment" provisions of Ttitle VII required -- by law -- that New Haven throw out the test.
In yesterday's decision the conservative majority of the Supreme Court didn't decide Sotomayor had decided in contravention of the law -- instead the conservatives rewrote the law, nullifying the provisions of the Civil Rights Act that applied to the New Haven decision.
While a case could be made that Title VII is outdated and should be rewritten, to use Sotomayor's decision to scream racism is just plain wrong.
Sotomayor, in her lower court decision, followed the law.
To claim otherwise is racism, and that's exactly what the right wing is engaged in at this time. Keith used the typical right wing Republican tactic of fear mongering to denigrate Sotomayor's law-based decision to support the black applicants -- black applicants who Keith calls...
Inferior and deadly.
It's the same tactic used by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and their followers in the right wing blogosphere.
Ironically, the Republican racists were handed a club by the conservatives on the Supreme Court - and now they are claiming Sotomayor was racist in her decision to uphold the law, And, ironically, had Sotomayor decided against the New Haven township in her lower court decision, she'd have been accused of legislating from the bench -- which is exactly what the Supreme Court conservative majority did in their decision yesterday to support the firefighters.
Racism has reached a boiling point in America, and the Republican party is the racists' flag bearer...
We defeated them in the 2006 and 2008 elections, and we'll defeat them here. I have absolutely no doubt that Sotomayor will be confirmed -- but not until after the Republican racists do their best to brand lies, misinformation and fear into Americans.
