We’ll be hearing a lot about Ricci v DeStefano in the coming days and weeks, because Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor ruled against the group of 17 firefighters – 16 white and one Hispanic – in their reverse-discrimination suit against the City of New Haven, Conn.

What we won’t hear a lot about, I’m guessing, is the story itself. So I’ll jump into that one with both feet, cause what the hell.

The fire department of New Haven has an exam they give to determine who gets promoted to Lieutenant and Captain. 68 whites (including one Frank Ricci), 27 blacks and 23 Latinos took the test. There were seven Captain vacancies and eight Lieutenant vacancies. The top nineteen scorers were seventeen whites and two Hispanics… no blacks.

This was an unexpected result. Minority firefighters had done much better on previous exams, and the fact that no blacks would get a promotion led the City of New Haven to hold hearings on whether the test violated the Civil Rights Act. In the end, no one was promoted: no whites, no blacks, no Latinos. Nobody.

Ricci and seventeen others decided to sue. They lost in District Court, they lost on appeal in Circuit Court and are now taking their case before the Supreme Court.

Fundamentally, the City of New Haven chose not to certify the test results because they believed the results were bogus, not because they wanted to push unqualified firefighters of color ahead of others. As the New Haven Corporation Counsel said:

…results of previous exams in this department and in other departments have not had this kind of a result, which is one of the reasons why these results were so startling when they came down. These results were different.

I’d actually recommend reading the original District Court decision, which is surprisingly well-written and interesting.

The reason that this is coming to a head is because President Obama is nominating Sonia Sotomayor, who has sat on the Second Circuit Court since 1998. Sotomayor, who was named to the New York District Court by George H. W. Bush, is by any reasonable analysis a moderate, but Obama’s political opponents want to paint her as a dangerous liberal.

Ultimately, the question was not one of fairness per se, of course, but of law. If one disagrees with the decision, then one has to look at changing the law. And if we’re going to reopen Title VII – or indeed the whole Civil Rights Act – then I fear for our future. Because I don’t see a thoughtfulness in my fellow citizens on this issue. I see gut-reasoning and a rush to reimpose an ugly racism with a reasonable new “level playing field” face.

And if that’s what America wants, then so be it. But we should be prepared to acknowledge it openly.