Word: piscataway
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Sharon Taxman, who is white, and Debra Williams, who is black, both worked in the business department of a Piscataway, N.J., high school. Fiscal hardship required the school to trim the business department by one position. Although Taxman and Williams had equal seniority, the school decided to retain Williams, arguing that she lent racial diversity to the faculty...
...Justice Department under President Bush brought suit against the Piscataway Board of Education for having violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race-conscious employment decisions. Citing Title VII, a Federal Appeals Court ruled that Piscataway's practices were illegal insofar as they did not remedy any actual discrimination that Williams had suffered. The decision was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court...
These civil rights groups were not alone in their reluctance to defend affirmative action as practiced in Piscataway. The Clinton Administration (leery of the abolition of a system the President had pledged "to mend, not end") had expressed hope that the consideration of the Taxman case would not include a decision on the "extraordinarily broad issue" of affirmative action. Likewise, pundits who usually enthusiastically support affirmative action shied away from this case. New York Times Columnist Bob Herbert labeled Piscataway v. Taxman "the wrong case." Herbert argued that the case was unrepresentative of affirmative action, contending that Williams was better...
...Piscataway case is a clear example of affirmative action backers abandoning their convictions when confronted with real-world battles. Whether they saw it as a lost cause or simply could not stomach the harsh repercussions affirmative action can have for some, conceding the case undermined their credibility. Defenders of affirmative action would do well to embrace cases like this...
SETTLEMENT REACHED. Between the PISCATAWAY BOARD OF EDUCATION and SHARON TAXMAN, a white business teacher who sued the board for reverse discrimination after she was laid off in favor of a black colleague with equal seniority; for $433,500; in Piscataway...