Nafis Sabir is an African-American who wants to be a New York City firefighter. When he sat for the citys most recent exam in January 2007, known as test 6019, he scored in the top handful out of nearly 22,000 candidates.
I was 29 at the time, the former Marine says, and the test wasnt that hard. You study for it, and it takes some discipline. But I already had a lot of life experience to do that. Maybe some younger guys dont.
Sabir says the exam answers were often comically obvious. They might ask, Someone comes in the firehouse and looks at you with a crazy look. You can speak to him about it, talk to a supervisor, or punch him in the face. Which one should you not do? He laughs joylessly. If the test was easy, subsequent events have been difficult.
Although Sabirs results should have been good enough to get him in, for the past three years, he and hundreds of others have been stuck in a strange kind of limbo. Initially, their start date at the Fire Academy was delayed by budget shortfalls. Then, he and his classmates learned that the test they aced was found to be racist by the federal court, and they wouldnt be allowed to take positions in the department until a better test could be devised, or the city could come up with some other way to hire new firefighters.
In other words, Sabir, a black man, cant get a job because he passed a test the court believes was intended to make him fail because of his race.
First, they said they couldnt hire us because of money. Then they said they couldnt because minorities didnt score well. I dont get it, says David Cargin, another African-American man in the same position.
Cargin had done well on the test in part, he says, because he, like others, had taken advantage of the preparation that was offered to applicants. The city offered free classes on how to study for the test, he says. He alternated between the classes and the gymwhere the city provided free training for a physical testbefore taking the written exam.
Even though he doesnt come from a firefighting family, Cargin, 29, says he didnt consider that a problem. Does having a parent on the job [as a firefighter] give you an advantage? Yeah. Is it an unreasonable advantage? No, he says.
Thirty-two-year-old Dion Hines is another black member of the class who tested high but is going nowhere. He takes issue with the courts conclusion that the entrance exam is unfair to African-Americans or anyone else. They blatantly say that the test is the problem. Its not rocket science. It doesnt require a higher degree of education, he says. There are hypothetical situations, and they give you information, and you have to regurgitate that information. You dont need to already be a firefighter to understand it.
But the federal courts have repeatedly blamed entrance examinations as part of the FDNYs inability to hire more minorities. In 1971, a group of police officers successfully sued the city over discriminatory hiring (Guardians Association of New York City v. the Civil Service Commission) under the federal Civil Rights Act. Two years later, a group of black firefighters, the New York Vulcan Society, was able to win a similar case, which forced the city to adopt hiring quotas. Within a couple of years, however, the city abandoned that approach before any progress could be made.