There was some hullabaloo yesterday about the Supreme Court ruling in the discrimination case of Ricci v. DeStefano. The mainstream media did a fine job of obfuscating facts in an attempt to breathe new life into what had become an almost dead controversy surrounding Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Selling newspapers or advertising on cable TV news new requires shrill noises to attract the attention of a US citizenry obsessed with the antics surrounding Michael Jackson’s recent passing and reminiscing about his halcyon days twenty-five years ago.
News outlets clamored that Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination was now in jeopardy. According to left-leaning media, the Supreme Court did catastrophic damage to decades of civil rights progress and in the process spanked Sotomayor. According to right-leaning media, which has been maligning much of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, the Court finally got something right and Sotomayor was a sullied candidate.
Nonsense. The Supreme Court actually didn’t decide anything of substance yesterday. Because I have been an ardent advocate of diversity throughout my career, I actually waded through the 93 pages of opinion on this case. I wanted to see for myself what was really going on.
Justice Scalia said it best. He writes, “I join the Court’s opinion in full, but write separately to observe that its resolution of this dispute merely postpones the evil day on which the Court will have to confront the question: Whether, or to what extent, are the disparate-impact provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 consistent with the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection? The question is not an easy one.”
Indeed it is not an easy question. The dispute in this case stems from a classic catch-22 situation: a firefighter promotion exam was conducted in New Haven-Connecticut as is the normal procedure. Because minorities on average didn’t score as well as whites on the exams, if the city used the test results to rank candidates for promotion, the city faced a discrimination case. On the other hand, not all minorities did poorly. If the city threw out the test results, they still faced a discrimination case from those who did well on the tests including whites who would claim reverse discrimination. The city threw out the tests and lawsuits were promptly filed by those who had done well on the tests.
The Supreme Court did not touch this catch-22 directly. The majority opinion simply pointed to the city’s rationale for discarding the tests and found their arguments wanting. Therefore, the city must use the test scores as originally planned – to rank the candidates for promotion based on scores. The Court did not rule on a constraint for Title VII. The Court did not resolve the inherent conflict between the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights and Title VII’s bias toward minorities.
I have seen terrible bias every day. I have lived in Chicago, Washington DC, near Philadelphia. I have travelled all across the US. The bias against Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, and Native Americans is prevalent and even here in bland Seattle I have seen pockets of virulent bias. We may have a black president but we are very far away from a land of equal rights blind to race, creed or color. Until then, we must be willing to argue forcefully and vigilantly against bias against minorities. I for one am thrilled that Sotomayor is the nominee. The Court may yet face this ugly question squarely and when it does, I hope there is much debate and passion to preserve a balance of power among our many races, creeds, and colors in this country.
Meanwhile, Ms. Sotomayor should keep clear of this noise and wait for the next celebrity fiasco to take public attention away from meaty matters like civil rights and who gets to sit on the nation’s highest bench.
Most successful leaders begin their careers yearning for success, fame, power, or wealth. There is nothing unusual about this motivation as a starting point, but our decisions and actions as leaders are intertwined with the lives of those we lead. Leadership is an intricate web of relationships. Build them and you succeed. Break them and you fail. Focus your effort on the greater good, and you help build a better world. Focus on your own well being, and you destroy far more than goodwill.
In the 1980′s I had the pleasure of travelling all over the Middle East. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Egypt, etc. Among the many interesting projects I worked on, I was particularly in love with a crazy experiment to slurp radar data from AWACS, E2C, and missile systems in the forward area (that’s where all the scary noise is) and munge all that radar data into one complete picture locating the bad guys and good guys and displayed neatly onto a metal suitcase version of a laptop. I think it was made by Compaq and looked something like this.
So I was in Egypt. My team was tweaking a missile firing test to show our hosts how well it worked in the desert. We had some down-time to visit the pyramids. That was very cool (and a story for another Friday…) Then we packed into transport trucks and headed well north of Cairo into an empty expanse of sand and dirt in the Sahara and we promptly shot down the test target. Extremely cool. The generals were impressed. We were elated.
In this basement hole in the wall, we sat among wealthy, well dressed locals. Some in fine Italian, handmade suits. Some in a silk and wool dishdash, equally well tailored. We were served Johnny Walker Black by a nice waiter in a tux and we skipped the ice or water because it was, after all, Cairo. Not one bottle. Not two. We had three bottles of Johnny to serve five people. That certainly took the edge off. We ate a kind of Egyptian tapas. Sheep’s brains served raw in lemon juice, or boiled in a bit of saffron broth, or deep fried. Nice choice. We had goat skewers and mutton skewers. Better. We ate tomatoes and cucumbers and hummus. And then came a nutty, crunchy tasting substance that had the texture of a bamboo shoot in Chop Suey. Except a little chewier. After asking my host what it was, he slurred whiskily that they were yummy sheep testicles. They were like their sheep brain appetizer cousins served raw in lemon juice, or boiled with saffron, or deep fried. No tartar sauce. Too bad. Messr. Walker urged me to keep my mouth shut, jut my chin firmly, smile, and eat a second helping like my host. I chewed merrily and washed it down with some more Johnny.
Holly is a friend of mine and a talented strategy faciliator. She is a highly qualified authority on management techniques after serving for many years as a consultant to major corporations around the world.
The situation in Iran serves as a sharp object lesson. Every leader at every level in every organization faces the test of power. The best will will use the power of their position to create a better world, even if it means sacrificing themselves. The mediocre will use that power to retain their position.
As a young man, I had often heard tales of the hearty Finnish appetite for vodka, for cross country skiing, and for swimming in icy waters. They all seemed like tall tales to me. Oh how wrong you can be.
Tens of millions of people are glued to their televisions every autumn to cheer their favorite NFL team to hit, shove, and grind their opponents into the dirt. We openly and eagerly celebrate the physical spectacle of football—a sport that rewards the most agile of men with the roar of 100,000 adoring fans while brutally punishing the rest. The NFL is filled with young men trained to withstand and deliver severe pain week after week. Yet we act surprised when those men fail to instantly transform into gentlemen of compassion when they walk off the field of approved violence. We wag our fingers at those who find it hard to turn off the aggression and cruelty we so enjoy watching on the gridiron.