Robert Conquest’s first law is:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
This probably best explains the dichotomy between Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s ruthless race realism in hiring her own law clerks (apparently, she only hired one black out of about 150 hires over her 40 years as a judge) versus her dissent in the famous Ricci case that if on a firefighter’s promotion test blacks don’t score well, that is prima facie evidence of disparate impact discrimination (since, apparently, everybody knows there’s no point in requiring fire captains to be book smart about fighting fires. They just need to be strong and brave and have “command presence.")
In 2009’s Ricci Reverse Racism case in which fireman Frank Ricci sued New Haven’s mayor for tearing up results of the FD promotion exam because the top scores were earned by 13 whites, 2 Latinos and 0 blacks, RBG’s dissent said ratio was prima facie evidence of discrimination.
Ironically, Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t seem to think the logic of the 1972 Griggs disparate impact discrimination ruling or her dissent in Ricci applied to her personally:
Of the ~150 law clerks she hired over 40 years as a judge, only one was black.
In the 2009 Ricci case, Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw fire captain jobs as appropriate for dumb guys with strong backs and confident manners, so more blacks should have those jobs. But in her own hiring of law clerks, IQ and work ethic were crucial, so 0.6% of her clerks were black.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a human biodiversity race realist about hiring for the kind of jobs she knew best — law clerks (for which she only hired 1 black out of ~150). But her IQ snobbery meant she underrated cognitive demands of jobs like fire captain, some of which have become vastly more technical over Ginsburg’s lifetime.
