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White Discrimination? Are White Firemen Smarter Than Black Firemen?

When I was a kid growing up in Harlem, as I walked across 125th Street end to end there were 3 firehouses. As I peeked inside on many occasion, I only recall seeing 2 black firemen among all 3 that employed about 30 per shift per station. They were all Irish and Italian, just like most of the city’s police force.

I would see the same as I passed by construction sites. For those jobs you had to be in the union and to be in the union someone had to sponsor you and of course, then, no whites would sponsor someone Black.  All children tend to choose careers based on the role models they see. As a child I couldn’t understand why I saw so few minorities in these visible, respected positions.

There is always the implied false opinion by some that Blacks are not as smart and that's the reason for our absense. I knew a lot of dumb white kids in the mostly white schools I've attended.  So I knew better. But what I did come to know then and its true now, is the insidious and incestuous means that are employed to keep others out from Wall Street to main street.

You will find in most of the major US cities, that many of the Italian and Irish fire fighters are the sons and grandsons, uncles, nephews and cousins of those who came before them. They not only pass on experience and wisdom they also pass along questions and answers for many of these qualifying exams. So like applicants are never without help from their own.

Black’s are told that we need to pull ourselves up by our boot straps and work harder, while some others sit back knowing that they already have all the answers or can easily get them. You take 3 generations and multiple versions of the same test and you compile them in a family, friends accessable data base that you share with your own kind and you too will begin to believe the lie that you are geneticly superior just because of your pigmentation.

If your home was burning and you called the fire department would you tell the operator only to send white firemen? No, that would be absurd.

11-year veteran firefighter James Watkins, who passed the promotional exam but didn’t score high enough to make the first round of promotions. He said he turned down an offer to join the “New Haven 20” Ricci lawsuit.  He accused the Supreme Court of “changing the rules in the middle of the game” by coming up with new criteria for how cities should apply Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And he said he expects a backlash from victorious white colleagues and firefighter unions.

(Click on the play arrow to watch those comments.) On the other hand, he and NAACP President James Rawlings repeatedly said they saw silver linings in Monday’s ruling that will enable them to continue filing lawsuits and taking other actions in the name of advancing diversity. Which they plan to do. “It doesn’t end here,” Tinney said. “Folks can pop champagne bottles,” firefighter Douglas Wardlaw (pictured) said Tuesday, referring to the victorious plaintiffs in the case.

“They can smoke cigars all they want. But it’s not over. We’re still saving fighting the fight. We’re still saving lives. We’re still producing African-American, Latino and female heroes to look up to.” Whither Title VII? Though a “disappointment to civil rights,” the 5-4 majority opinion leaves open the door for people to file lawsuits challenging employers with discriminating under Title VII, Rawlings said.

He and Tinney said they feared that the conservative-leaning court would strike down the entire act. Instead, it ruled that New Haven’s specific actions in ignoring the results of this test were invalid, they said. Tinney added that the ruling doesn’t even necessarily order the city to certify the results of the test in question, a 2003 exam in which no African-Americans scored high enough to qualify for immediate promotions to lieutenant or captain.

Three black candidates passed the captain’s exam, none qualifying to be eligible for promotion to seven vacancies. A total of 19 black firefighters passed the lieutenants’ exam. None qualified to fill an initial eight vacancies, but at least three would have been eligible for subsequent promotions, according to court records.

“We believe this decision reinforces the ability of minorities to challenge questionable and discriminatory promotional examinations,” said Tinney. “It only affects the city of New Haven by defining and heightening the standard by which a city must adhere in order to voluntarily comply with Title VII in the face of exams that appear to have a discriminatory impact.”

The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, did resist an apparent effort by Justice Atonin Scalia to go further and rule unconstitutional the ignoring of test results based on their having a “disparate impact.” But the decision didn’t just kick the case back to the lower court. It reversed a lower-court ruling that had been in favor of the city. It gave the plaintiffs the summary judgment ruling they were looking for from the beginning. It ruled against the city specifically on the question of whether “disparate impact” — i.e. results that leave out minorities, as opposed to proof that a test was flawed — is enough of a criterion to toss an exam. Furthermore, it decreed a new standard for interpreting Title VII.

Kennedy’s opinion overturned decades of bipartisan precedent by decreeing that no longer can a city be liable for ignoring test results simply on the basis it expects to be sued — which is what New Haven did here. Even Mayor John DeStefano — who disagreed with the decision and was the target of the ruling — said Monday that he believes the decision will in fact lead the lower court to certify the results of the 2003 exam. And he and Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court-watcher Linda Greenhouse said Monday that, by their reading of the various opinions issued, this decision could well presage a further eroding of civil-rights law.

National Picture Gary Tinney and James Rawlings insisted that the Firebirds and NAACP won’t give up. They will file suit to challenge the test results if indeed the lower court ends up certifying the 2003 promotional exams, Tinney said. Reverse-discrimination suits like Ricci are spreading across the country, Tinney said.

One such suit is taking place in Bridgeport; Bridgeport Firebirds President Shane Porter accompanied Tinney at Monday’s press conference. Tinney repeatedly emphasized the low numbers of not just black and Hispanics, but women, too, in fire department ranks, especially in leadership roles.

Only 13 of the New Haven department’s 89 leadership positions are filled by blacks or Latinos, he said; the department’s 411 firefighters include only 11 women. In Hamden, he said, a city that’s 33 percent black, just nine of 115 firefighters are black. Just 3 percent of New York City’s 11,000 firefighters are black, he said. Reversing numbers like these requires a lengthy battle, and strong civil rights laws, he said.

" White Only! " : Private Pool Bans Black and Hispanic Campers

Here's another example of how racism is taught generationally to children at a very early age. Those adults who are the perpetrators of this racism teach their children at a very early age,  at the expense of the victims they hurt, that skin color or a lack there of means superiority. Their children internalize these lies and grow up to be many of the racist, paranoid adults we see today.  Not knowing or wanting to know any of the contributions that minorities have made. They teach their children by words and actions that " Those  People Are Different. They're Not As Good, As Pretty Or As Smart As You."

HUNTINGDON VALLEY, Pa. (July 9) - Members and officials of a private swimming pool in a predominantly white Philadelphia suburb reacted to a visiting group of minority children by asking them not to return and pulling other kids out of the water, a day camp director said, and the state is investigating.

The Creative Steps camp in northeast Philadelphia had contracted for the 65 children at the day camp to go each Monday afternoon to The Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, camp director Alethea Wright said Thursday. But shortly after they arrived June 29, she said, some black and Hispanic children reported hearing racial comments. "A couple of the children ran down saying, 'Miss Wright, Miss Wright, they're up there saying, "What are those black kids doing here?'''" she said.

The gated club is on a leafy hillside in a village that straddles two townships with overwhelmingly white populations. It says it has a diverse, multiethnic membership. Wright said she went to talk to a group of members at the top of the hill and heard one woman say she would see to it that the group, made of up of children in kindergarten through seventh grade, did not return. "Some of the members began pulling their children out of the pool and were standing around with their arms folded," Wright said. "Only three members left their children in the pool with us."

Several days later, the club refunded the camp's $1,950 without explanation, said Wright, who added that some parents are "weighing their options" on legal action.

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission will immediately investigate, chairman Stephen A. Glassman said Thursday. "Allegedly, this group was denied the use of a pool based on their race," Glassman said. "If the allegations prove to be true, this is illegal discrimination." The investigation was requested by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., issued a statement calling the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said he was looking into the matter.

The United States' highest-profile black swimmer, Olympic gold medalist Cullen Jones, said "hearing about what's happened to these 65 kids is both disturbing and appalling." Chuck Wielgus, executive director of USA Swimming, the governing body for the U.S. swim team, was stunned at the accusations. "This is the sort of thing you'd hear about in 1966, during the height of the civil rights movement, not in 2009, and not in the City of Brotherly Love, of all places," he said.

Club president John Duesler told Philadelphia television station WTXF that several club members complained because the children "fundamentally changed the atmosphere" at the pool but that the complaints didn't involve race. WCAU-TV, NBC 10 in Philadelphia, reported Duesler issued a statement saying, "There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion ... of the club."

In a statement released on its Web site Thursday afternoon, the club called the allegations of racial discrimination "completely untrue" and claimed overcrowding from more than one outside camp was the problem. "We had originally agreed to invite the camps to use our facility, knowing full well that the children from the camps were from multiethnic backgrounds," it said. "Unfortunately, we quickly learned that we underestimated the capacity of our facilities and realized that we could not accommodate the number of children from these camps."

The club said it "deplores discrimination." "Whatever comments may or may not have been made by an individual member is an opinion not shared by The Valley Club Board," it said. Amy Goldman said she's been a member of the club for two years. She said the pool wasn't particularly crowded and the children from Creative Steps were "well behaved and respectful." She said there had been black members at the club in the past, though she couldn't remember seeing any this year.

The club appeared closed Thursday afternoon, and the guard station at the entrance was unattended. About two dozen protesters, most of them white, held signs in front of the club's locked gates and chanted slogans including, "Jim Crow swims here!" Spencer Lewis, from Conshohocken, showed up with some young nieces and nephews and said he believes the club owes the children an apology. "

I don't believe everyone here has racist thoughts, but what was said was insulting and offensive," said Lewis, who's black. Wright rejected the overcrowding explanation, saying the club covers 10 acres with a "nice-sized" pool and a separate pool for younger children. The board, she said, knew that her group included 65 children, and none of them had misbehaved.

"We were not welcome, once the members saw who we were," she said. Wright said that the children were upset and that she was looking for a psychologist to speak to them next week. Some children have asked her whether they are "too dark" to swim in the pool, she said.

Day camp member Araceli Carvalho, 9, said she was upset when told she wouldn't be allowed to return. "I said, 'That's not right,'" she said. But when asked if she wants to return now, she said, "I don't want to swim here anymore." Wright said Girard College, a boarding school for poor children in first through 12th grades, has offered to host the camp children for the summer.

What do you think about what happened to these kids? Share your opinion below, then if you're as angry as I am about what happened to these children, you can send a letter to the Department Of Justice by Clicking Here.

 

Obama Says To the 2009 NAACP Education Is The Only Way! But Is There Another?

Listen below as President Barack Obama makes his tremendous speech before the NAACP speaking about the descrimination that Black people have always had to face, and the challenges we now face as Americans today.

I agree that education must be a priority for our children, but I think the most immediate action we can take is to be more selective about how we spend our dollars. The improvements Obama talks about will take at least 10-20 years.

Excessive high unemployment in our and Hispanic communities is getting worse. As I listened, I couldn't help but believe we must be more discriminating with the dollars we do spend and who we spend our money  with if we want real change sooner rather than later. So many of the companies who's products we buy choose  not to employ or underemploy us.

Collectively Blacks and Hispanics combined now spend over $1 trillion annually. Think about what we could do immediately to build our own communities and employ ourselves,  if we spent just a portion of this money in our own communities and with our own people.

The Center For Disease Control reported yesterday that Black people are now the most obese Americans. If we demand that the supermarkets that serve our communities make nutritional and other products produced by Black owned companies available and we make a committment to buy these products, we could begin to quickly create the kind of positive change Black people so badly want.

We keep waiting for someone else to save us. We only have to look at the Indian, Korean and Jewish communities to see what self love and self determination  does to grow and strengthen their communities.

There is a Kosher isle in every supermarket that serves a Jewish community and most of those products in that isle come from Jewish owned companies.

The International Association Of Hebrew Jewish Free Loans is a prime example of what Jews do to help themselves.

What do you think?

If You Don't Buy From Black Owned Businesses, Who Will?

I personally donated $100 to support the Andersons experiment.

Original Transaction
Date	Type	Status	Details	Amount
Apr. 27, 2009	Donation To John Anderson	Completed	...	-$100.00 USD

Black people spend 99.9% of our money with every other business except our own. The least you could do is watch the CBS Early Show Tomorrow to undertand what's at stake and what Black people (you) can do to m0ve beyond complaining to real immediate economic change.

CBS News "Early Show" 7/28 Watch history made Tuesday, July 28, 8AM (EST) as for the first time ever, a Black family shares with the world the necessity and power of using their buying power to improve their community. The Andersons will present their experiment as proof of how Black towns "starve to death" since most businesses there do not represent or reinvest in the area or people.