Equal Outcomes? They Don't Exist

One of the most fruitless, and destructive, pursuits in our society today is the search for equal outcomes between socioeconomic groups. The intelligentsia and politicians promoting such ideas rarely have the pay the consequences (always unintended, of course) of the policies resulting from this pursuit, but society does.

Case in point: A city in Connecticut has decided to abolish a promotion test at the local fire department, saying that too few minorities would pass the test, and so it wasn't "fair". In other words, even though the test was not designed to benefit any certain person, but rather based upon a set of criteria specific to firefighting, it had to be thrown out because the outcome of this test might not be "equal" across racial lines.

The city cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as evidence, saying that the "disparate impact" would violate the Act. We must confront this erroneous reasoning. The Civil Rights Act was written to eliminate race as a factor in situation like this. The entire purpose of the act was to end the practice of deciding things like hiring and promotion based on the person's skin color.

Unless the test was designed to discriminate against an individual, then it doesn't violate the Act. Whether or not different racial groups will achieve the same passing rate should be of no concern to the gov't. The test is about the skills needed for fighting fires and saving lives and it is being trivialized and made racist. That's right, racist. Any time you decide something based on skin color, that's a racist viewpoint. Furthermore, there is no way to retroactively produce equal outcomes in any situation. It's a flawed idea from the beginning.

There is no way to engineer equal outcomes. No two people are identical. The officials who threw out the test said that too few hispanics and blacks were going to pass. The whites were all grouped together. This is even more racist. How many of those white firemen were of Italian descent? Did the Germans have an unfair advantage? If you want to break it down along racial lines, then go all the way. Once you start, it's clear how ridiculous it would be.

Policies like this have been tried across the globe: India, Malaysia, West Africa, Nigeria, America. Bureaucrats and busy bodies start running around trying to fix all these inequalities, but they do more harm than good. If you take the basis for promoting firefighters away from the skills of fighting fires, than it could be your wife or child that dies in a fire while a perfectly diverse, but less qualified, team of firemen works outside. And that's not to say that non-whites are less skilled, nothing could be farther from the truth. But making promotion criteria about stuff like race can only result in lowering the quality of those promoted. These scenarious always backfire, but they're good enough to win votes.

The bureaucrats sit in an office, look at the results of a fireman's test and declare it to be "unfair", and go about their merry way, patting themselves on the back for being so sensitive, so progressive, so in touch that they saved the day. But they only leave a trail of consequences in their wake. And I must mention, that the people deciding these policies rarely have any actual knowledge of the subject.

Meanwhile, the city has less qualified firefighters. The fire department has to take its focus off protecting the population and excelling at what they do, and turn to pleasing the abstract and subjective whims of politicians. Society pays the price of these leftist, social engineering schemes every time.