Fire Departments Sued by Biden-Harris for Requiring Job Candidates to Learn How to Fight Fires

Thank heavens for the Biden-Harris administration and its steadfast determination to root out institutional racism wherever it may hide.

And it hides in the strangest places, too. For instance, do you know it’s institutionally racist to expect a firefighter to know enough to fight fires?

I know, I’d been too busy centering my white privilege (or whatever) to notice, but it’s true! If it weren’t, why would two jurisdictions have settled with the Department of Justice for requiring firefighters to know how to do add, subtract and divide?

According to a Sunday report from the Daily Wire, the administration’s Department of Justice apparently has its priorities in the right place, because it’s recently “undertaken a slew of lawsuits against local police and fire departments alleging that it is racist to require hires entrusted with public safety to know basic math.”

The latest lawsuit was filed on Oct. 11 against South Bend, Indiana, where the examination to become a police officer had a “disparate impact” against black and female applicants.

(Hey, whatever happened to South Bend’s former mayor? He was famous for a hot minute a few years ago. What’s his name, Pete Something-or-Other? Starts with a B. Hard to pronounce. Maybe the Biden administration can find him to sort this mess out. What’s he doing these days? Oh, wait …)

According to the lawsuit, “South Bend uses a written examination that discriminates against black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants.”

Yes, apparently, expecting someone to be smart or strong enough to be a police officer is racist or sexist. The latter is a matter of nature, the former is not. However, as the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak pointed out, that was just one of the lawsuits, which allege basically any kind of written test to qualify someone to be a firefighter or police officer — no matter how straightforward — creates a “disparate impact” if there are different failure rates among white and non-white minority applicants, even if the majority of applicants, regardless of race, still pass.

The concept of “disparate impact,” as Rosiak noted, is “the radical theory that holds that anytime there are statistical racial disparities, racism must be the cause — even if no one can explain how.”

Three other suits have either been settled or have been decided against the jurisdiction they were filed against.

Earlier this month there was a settlement with Durham, North Carolina, over a written test that blacks failed more often than other races. “Employers should identify and eliminate practices that have a disparate impact based on race,” U.S. Attorney Sandra J. Hairston for the Middle District of North Carolina said in a statement announcing the settlement.

“The Justice Department will continue to work to eliminate discriminatory policies that deprive qualified applicants of a fair chance to compete for employment opportunities.”

Completely irrelevant, just like one of the online practice tests for firefighter exams cited by Rosiak: “One question asks if a building is 350 feet away, how many 60-foot hoses would be needed.”

Qualified applicants, fair chance!

Earlier this year, Cobb County, Georgia, similarly settled with the DOJ in part over “the County’s past use of a written examination designed to determine placement level in college classes as a method for ranking candidates to move forward in the firefighter hiring process,” according to a statement.

“The County’s use of these employment practices disproportionately removed qualified African Americans from consideration for a firefighter position.”

“Also this month, the DOJ forced Maryland State Police to pay $2.75 million to women who were barred from being officers because they couldn’t pass physical fitness exams testing, for example the ability to run quickly, and blacks who couldn’t pass a written test,” Rosiak noted.

“The test that the DOJ says is racist is designed to ensure that cops are at least as smart as an elementary school student and can serve residents by, for example, adding up the total value of stolen property when items were stolen valued at $400, $40, $1,500, and $100.”

Institutional racism at work, folks. (Sorry — folx. My privilege was showing there for a sec.)

Sarcastic hyperbole aside, this doesn’t make anybody from minority communities safer, which is literally the job first responders are, if things are going correctly, supposed to do: make any community safe from errant elements within it, be it crime or natural disasters.

Unless these tests are specifically designed to exclude minority communities or unusually arduous — and evidence has not been brought forward that either is true, but it doesn’t need to be when the “disparate impact” test is applied — it actually makes majority-minority communities or women demonstrably, prima facie less safe by allowing unqualified non-white or female applicants to take the jobs.

But, through the looking-glass of institutional privilege theory, firefighters don’t need to know how to fight fires, or police officers to do the basic math that police officers need to do.

Here’s a better thought: Instead of suing the first responders in the communities where this “disparate impact” is occurring, why not sue the schools?

Perhaps my privilege is showing here a bit, but it seems to me like they’ve failed their residents by not ensuring literally every person who leaves with a K-12 education can do very basic math, instead of failing them by not allowing unqualified first responders the opportunity to take life-saving jobs they don’t have the rudimentary knowledge for.

Radical theory, I know. Until it’s carried out, however, it’s more proof that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden couldn’t care less about saving people’s lives, just about saving their own face with their party’s activist base.

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