http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070201864.html
Obama says court still allows for racial diversity By MARK SHERMAN The Associated Press Thursday, July 2, 2009; 3:25 PM WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama cast this week's Supreme Court decision in favor of white firefighters as a narrow case that nevertheless allows employers and educators to take race into account in hiring, promotions and admissions. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, said the court was "moving the ball" on affirmative action by telling public and private employers they could not easily discard promotion exams just because the results left no African-Americans likely to be promoted. "This was a very narrow case, so it's hard to gauge where they will take it," Obama said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. He did not criticize the court's ruling, even though the justices voted 5-4 to reverse a decision that his own high court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, endorsed as an appeals court judge. As a senator, Obama voted against confirming two justices in the majority in the firefighters case: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, the two nominees of President George W. Bush. The president was critical of the clumsy process that New Haven, Conn., used to administer promotion exams, then tossed them aside because of the racially skewed results. He said the city might have prevailed if it "had thought through how it was going to approach the issue ahead of time and said, 'We think merit and highly qualified firefighters are absolutely important. That doesn't contradict our desire to make sure that there is diversity in a city that's 60 percent black and Hispanic. Let's design promotion approaches that reconcile those two things.'" Instead, Obama said, "I think what people instinctively, probably, reacted to on that particular case had more to do with the fact that the people that studied for those tests already had a set of expectations that were thwarted." Critics of racial preferences have argued that Obama's election demonstrates that affirmative action is no longer necessary. But the president noted that "the Supreme Court didn't close the door to affirmative action, if properly structured." He said such programs have not been nearly as helpful to minorities or damaging to whites as they have been portrayed. "Crude quotas" are unnecessary and constitutionally impermissible, he said. But, "I do think that there are still circumstances in which on a college admissions or on a hiring decision, taking into account issues of past discrimination or taking into account issues of diversity of a workforce or a student body can still be appropriate," the president said.
