The Black Leadership Forum — an organization that includes the
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Urban League, the
National Council of Negro Women, and others — deflected energy from
the controversial Taxman v. Piscataway case that the Supreme Court had
committed to hear this session. The forum agreed to finance 70 percent
of the nearly $450,000 settlement that the plaintiff and her lawyers
will receive from the Piscataway school board.
Sharon Taxman was the White business education teacher who was laid
off in a downsizing while Debra Williams, an African American business
education teacher, was retained. Since the two women were hired the
same day and deemed “equally” qualified, the school board justified
retaining Williams on the basis of “diversity.”
Faster than she could spell diverse, Taxman was filing a lawsuit.
Her quest for “equality” was affirmed by every court up to the Supreme
Court, which had agreed to hear her case. Civil rights activists
thought this was the wrong one to take to the nation’s highest court,
so they bought Taxman out.
I’m not sure how I feel about the buy-out. It’s like postponing
something tragic — in this case, the apathy that comes from a Supreme
Court which appears to be indifferent to diversity as well as equality.
But I am convinced that there are at least two villains in this story
— and one of them is the Piscataway School Board.
Come again? To some, these guys seem like the good guys. They
retained an African American teacher and laid off a White one,
upholding diversity. At the same time, though, they tragically argued
that two workers were “equally” qualified when one held a master’s
degree while the other had a lesser education.
If I were Debra Williams I’d be fuming through the ears. The myth
that hard work and the quest for education would give you a leg up was
busted in her case. Rather than the school board affirming her superior
education, they told her that her master’s degree was not worth enough
for her to be considered more than equally qualified over a colleague
with less education. (I almost typed inferior for less, but that is the
oppressor’s game.)
A careful examination of what happened in Piscataway explains why
affirmative action has become America’s whipping post. Instead of White
employers telling White employees that they aren’t competitive, the
White employees are told that a position was assigned or retained
because of affirmative action. That is the kind of lazy dishonesty that
fuels the myth of White superiority.
