Promoting White Kids

My opinion on the Ricci v. DeStefano case is this: there is a reason we have 9 Supreme Court justices, and not just 1 or 3.

Now, I have to be careful what I say, because I am a white male from the upper-middle class and compared to some, grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth. But when I was applying to college 10 years ago, there was a noticeable abundance of scholarships available for minority students, and a noticeable lack of scholarships available for white males from the upper-middle class. I was not so naive as to think this was some sort of discrimination against whites; rather I was cognizant that minority opportunies were in place to level the playing field that had been stacked in my favor.
However, I am as strong proponent of the realization that the removal of the dermal layer of a human being erases any ability to discern their race, i.e. the human mind architecture is not correlated to race, and anyone that tells you so is either citing nothing, or citing research sponsored by white supremacist agendas.
In short, I did not feel oppressed by the lack of scholarships, and I certainly believed that when I was in a college class with mixed demographics, if I excelled more than a black person, it was becuase I worked harder, not because they were black. Nor was it because of their background prior to college, in my opinion. When I got to college, I considered everyone to have a clean slate.

Now, on to the alleged exam. As someone who understands how to run an ANOVA, and how to run a student's T test, let me tell you: 77 examinees is a very small sample size. To me, it is difficult to explain why the minority test takes fares so much poorer than the white test takers. But what I do know is that without a much larger sample, it is very difficult to provide a clear understanding of the results. Had this been a nationwide test, like the SAT, and minority examinees nationwide across all demographics and economic levels had scored lower than their caucasian peers from equivalent backgrounds, then you might have an issue with the test questioning.
Two of my friends are executives for a company that administers online nurse qualification exams. This test is taken nationwide by a large percentage of nurses in training. Their results show that there isn't a correlation to race in the pass/fail ratios. I suggest to the reader that the same might be true for the firefighter test, had it been administered to a larger sample pool.

But the thing I find most suspect about this (and if you have more details please let me know) is that a 70% on the test was passing, and a 69% was failing. Although I do not know the exact results of the test, is it possible that a couple white examinees got 71% and a couple of black examinees got 69%? What if all the black examinees got scores in the 60-69% range, and in so doing, failed...by a hair. What if all the white examinees got scores in the 70-75% range, and in so doing, passed...by a hair. Although only separated by a couple percentage points, the white examinees pass, and the black examinees don't. And so the results seem more extreme than they might actually be.

As far as the Sotomayor angle...I have no opinion.


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