Author: Joshua Thompson
My op-ed on the Lewis v. City of Chicago case ran in the Washington Times today. Here is a snippet:
Government employers can take painstaking measures to craft tests that won't disadvantage anyone on the basis of race or ethnicity (Chicago, for instance, spent $5 million on that goal with its firefighters exam), but they still can't guarantee that an objective test will produce a "balanced" racial distribution among the top scorers.
So they're pressured to give up the quest for objectivity altogether. In a defensive effort to avoid disparate-impact lawsuits, cities and other government entities will skew their tests with a specific racial outcome in mind. Instead of designing questions to be race-neutral, they will develop race-conscious tests that put skin color above genuine job-related concerns.
You can read the whole piece here.
