Three cheers for the Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down justice on behalf of a few white firefighters. Awesome. According to Monday's court decision, several white firefighters were mistreated by the city of New Haven, Conn., when it refused to promote them despite their high scores on a promotional exam. In a 5-4 decision, the high court ruled that the city should not have trashed the exams because black firefighters performed poorly. Is this not what Martin Luther King Jr. wanted---that one day blacks would be judged according to their character, not their skin color? So why would four judges encourage racial preferences?

The court's decision actually moves the country in the right direction toward achieving true fair treatment under the law. Why are we not celebrating the fact that in the 1940s there may not have even been black firefighters in Connecticut or that back then they wouldn't even have been allowed to take the promotion exam in the first place? This is a classic example of the conflict we have in our country with those who understand equality in terms of manufactured, cosmetic social results versus those who understand equality and justice in terms of fair processes that do not discriminate.

What would have represented real injustice would have been a scenario where the black firefighters scored higher than all the whites on the exam and still were not promoted because they were black. The idea that a fair and equal process is ignored because we want to achieve cosmetic racial results to remedy discrimination against previous generations creates a new form of injustice.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the white firefighters "understandably attract this court's sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them." What? Actually, they do have a right to promotion because they scored higher on the exam. Questioning the utility of the exam in evaluating promotion candidates is one thing, but it is not the role of judges to misuse the law for the sake of social "remedies" to historical events.

New Haven, seeking to fill senior fire department vacancies, administered the test to 77 candidates for lieutenant and 41 candidates for captain. Fifty-six firefighters passed the exams: 41 whites, nine blacks, and six Hispanics. Of those, however, only 17 whites and two Hispanics could expect promotion. If the exam was racially biased in favor of whites, would it not have also excluded the Hispanics? Did the exam discriminate against the other whites that performed poorly as well? Maybe they weren't the right kind of white people.

Racial preferences that override the rules do nothing but create more injustice and do not represent equality and fair treatment at all. If the black firefighters really believed in equality they would have been thankful that they were free to take the exam in the first place and congratulate the Hispanics and whites who performed better than them like everybody else who did not make the cut.