Your heartwarming story about the firefighters of Fire Engine Company 16 and their good works with the children of the Robert Taylor Homes (Page 1, Aug. 15) was just the sort of good news item that many readers and viewers ask newspapers and TV stations to run as an antidote to, or at least a tonic for, the usual bad news of the day. Or was it?
Your writer, at the beginning of the story, noted that the “courts are weighing the merits of affirmative action in the city’s fire department,” and that “about 20 percent (of the fire department’s employees) are African-American . . .” while “blacks make up about 38 percent of the city’s population.” These facts are unrelated to the rest of the story. Unrelated, that is, unless the writer is trying to make a case for affirmative action based on the need for “role models.”
Of course, role models are a good thing. But there are significant problems with advocating affirmative action (a euphemism for race-based employment decisions) in the hiring and promoting of firefighters (or any other government employees) as the means to providing role models.
On a social level, there is the implication, as ugly as it is untrue, that role models can’t cross racial lines. As a Chicago firefighter, I can say that the good works attributed to Engine Company 16 are unique neither to that company nor to firefighters of any particular race. To posit that black children cannot take as good examples the white firefighters serving black neighborhoods, or vice versa, is to impute the prejudices of adults to children.
On the legal level, the courts have held that race can only be a factor in hiring and promoting firefighters (or police officers, or teachers, etc.) when used to negate the effects of past discrimination.
Those who champion using race as a factor in hiring and promoting firefighters for societal purposes (such as providing for role models or matching departmental racial composition to demographic percentages) are thus advocating an unfair and illegal course of action. Whatever their motive might be, one thing is clear: They are extremely confused about the proper function of government.
None other than U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) is a prime example of this confused thinking. Several years ago, when Congress was closing military bases throughout the country, Sen. Moseley-Braun bemoaned the closings and wondered aloud why the government wasn’t shutting down military bases overseas instead of in Illinois, “where people need jobs.” It apparently never crossed her mind that the purpose of a military base is to serve the security interests of the United States and that any jobs created thereby are incidental to that purpose.
Likewise, the fire department exists to put out fires. That firefighters can be role models is an added bonus for citizens (and firefighters themselves), not a reason for the fire department’s being.
If the Tribune supports the position that the Chicago Fire Department should make race-based employment decisions for societal purposes, it should do so on its editorial page.
