I won't even go into the whole Jim Crow thing. Lilo put it perfectly. But in regards to the FDNY being monitored, you left out one crucial little nugget: The FDNY was still 95% white as of last year. That's a fact. Do you really think that's fair?
When Garaufis ruled that the department was a "bastion of white privilege," he probably could have used a better choice of words, but he wasn't far off. The department has been blatantly ignoring Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 since, well, 1964.
Garaufis (who I'm no fan of, by the way) did the right thing.
Yes, I do think it's fair. It's fair because everyone took the same test. It seems like minorities want to abolish merit and have the courts hand them a job on a silver platter.
FDNY is mostly white because whites perform better on the written. That's simple to understand.
