Word: taxman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...considering race as a factor in hiring. Created to protect minorities from discrimination, this provision of the Civil Rights Act has therefore not been invoked against affirmative action programs that favor minorities. Affirmative action supporters feared that with political tides in the United States shifting to the right, the Taxman case would give the court the opportunity to codify this shift--eradicating the widespread use of affirmative action policies...
Anticipating that a conservative court would at the very least find Taxman's dismissal unjust, defenders of affirmative action implored the justices to confine their judgment to the case at hand. In essence, trying to cut their losses, many liberals urged the court to strike down affirmative action as it affected Taxman and Williams but to withhold judgment on racial preferences as a whole. As time passed, civil rights groups grew increasingly uneasy. In November, a coalition of such groups agreed to finance a settlement, effectively making the case and its constitutional dilemmas disappear for the time being...
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...
...idea that race can override deficiencies is that if all other things are equal, the minority candidate should be chosen. This eminently defensible case, in which race is a mere tiebreaker and not a be-all-and-end-all that wakes conservatives in a cold sweat, is the Taxman case. Seniority being equal, the Piscataway School Board chose the woman who lent diversity in addition to business savvy...