So...... the City of Austin is in discussions with the openly racist Eric Holder Dept of Justice (DOJ) over how much the DOJ is going to strong-arm out of our pockets over unsupported claims that minorities were discriminated against in hiring by the fire dept. Since both sides of the negotiation are manned by rabid liberals, I'm sure we can expect the city to fold like a cheap suit and agree with the DOJ that minorities are victims of City of Austin oppression. We're talking nearly $800,000 here - that's serious money for a ridiculous claim.
At issue are the results of standardized tests for firefighter jobs, which resulted in proportionately more white candidates than black or hispanic candidates passing the tests.
The DOJ letter to the city essentially acknowledges the city may have standards in place which result in disproportionate hiring of whites as long as the standards are relevant to the job. However, in the letter the DOJ claimed that a "statistically significant" low passing rate by minorities on standard professional tests, written by a national board, is sufficient reason to conclude that the city of Austin - rabidly liberal, and inclusion obsessed Austin - has discriminated against minorities. See the circular logic? We can have hiring standards that result in racial imbalances as long as the process was fair, but the racial imbalance proves the process wasn't fair. As for whether the test was relevant to the job, the DOJ doesn't include that in their determination. They just acknowledge the law allows this, but then they ignore this requirement.
You might recognize the words "ignore" and "law" get used a lot when discussing the Obama administration. The Obama administration ignores the law when using the IRS to intimidate political opponents, and when declaring exemptions to Obamacare when that law starts to fail, and when the law gets in the way of their desire to let illegal aliens stay in the country. Now they're adding laws regarding valid hiring practices to the list of laws they ignore.
According to the DOJ letter to the city, the DOJ did not consider differences in time spend studying for the test, which might have shown whether the test results correlate with effort by candidates to prepared for it, rather than with racism. Maybe the white candidates just tried harder. By then this is Eric Holder's style - whites are assumed racist until proven innocent.