Disparate Impact Madness Facilitates Massive Looting Spree in NYC

The concept of disparate impact has been a great boon to higher education. The Supreme Court’s Griggs v. Duke Power Co. ruling forbade intelligence tests for job applicants on the grounds that persons of preferred pigmentation tend to be less intelligent and therefore do poorly on the tests. Since such tests have a disparate impact, they are racist. Now students waste years and dig themselves into a lifetime of debt to acquire degrees that in many cases serve as nothing more than surrogates of the forbidden intelligence tests. This insane but highly useful legal concept can also be used to facilitate looting:

Taxpayers shelled out $98 million over a discriminatory FDNY screening test just four years ago — but that’s pocket change compared to the $1.7 billion the city may now have to pay out over a biased teaching exam, The Post has learned.

The FDNY test was “discriminatory” because whites did better on it than blacks.

Legal papers quietly filed over the summer reveal that a court-appointed special master has recommended paying a total of $91.6 million in damages to just 219 of the plaintiffs in a long-running class-action suit against the former Board of Education — now the Department of Education — over a racially biased certification exam.

Approximately 4,000 people are eligible for payments, according to court documents — so if the remaining recommendations follow suit, the final bill would be around $1.67 billion.

Good thing racial justice is a bargain at any price.

The teachers’ case involves the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, a state-mandated exam that city educators and job applicants were required to take from 1993 to 2004.

More than 90 percent of white test-takers passed the 80-question multiple-choice quiz… But black applicants scored passing grades only between 51 and 62 percent of the time, and Latinos had an even lower passing rate, just 47 to 55 percent.

Therefore, the test is racist, providing a taxpayer-financed bonanza for flunkers of color and their lawyers.

Demagogic politicians have discovered yet another use for disparate impact by applying it to drug laws. If more blacks than whites are arrested for violating a law, it must be the law’s fault, since according to liberal ideology, blacks and whites are exactly the same other than whites being racist.

In an attempt to pander to black voters, Rand Paul actually called for the repeal of all criminal laws that have disparate impact. This would mean literally all criminal laws. As noted by Jason Riley, blacks are more likely to commit not only drug crimes but also violent crimes and even white collar crimes.

You don’t have to be terribly bright to notice that the concept of disparate impact is insane. Yet you cannot reject it without acknowledging that our official state religion, political correctness, is also insane. So it will be with us for a while.

On a tip from Sean C.

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