Photo credit: Photo by Flickr user epSos.de

Trying to avoid toxic chemicals? Take a survey of the different spaces you occupy every day. We’ve covered ways to reduce toxic chemicals in your home and in your office. Today we’re covering another common space: Your car. Try these tips to reduce toxic chemicals in your car, and make your school drop-off, work commute, or errand-run healthier and safer.

Cars: Ever wonder what that “new car smell” came from? According to Rebecca Meuninck from the Ecology Center, “The “new car smell” is actually the smell of toxic chemicals being released from interior auto parts such as the seating, dashboards and vehicle trim.” Yikes! HealthyStuff.org just released a new guide to toxic chemicals in cars, including their Top 10 Best and Worst Picks for vehicles. If you’re in the market for a new car, visit HealthyStuff.org to learn more about the safest, least toxic cars on the market.

Open a window: Don’t worry, you don’t have to roll your windows all the way down during these wintery months. But when you’re in heavy traffic, Healthy Child Healthy World recommends cracking your window slightly to reduce carbon monoxide buildup inside your car.

Car Seats: Avoid flame retardants in car seats by choosing carseats that don’t use polyurethane foam and that don’t have a TB117 label. Some manufacturers state that their products do not contain halogenated flame retardants. Even with a safety promise, it’s a good idea to double check with the manufacturer before you buy. You can check chemical levels in carseats and more on HealthyStuff.org.

Headsets: When it’s time to make or take a call, use your hands free headset as much as possible: Headsets emit less radiation than cell phones. Check out EWG’s buying guide for cell phone headsets to help you find the safest headset with the least radiation.

Air Fresheners: Look, we all want a delightful, fresh-rain-new-laundry-mountain-whatever smelling car. But air fresheners are not the way to go when it comes to keeping your indoor air smelling fresh. While improving the indoor air scent, air fresheners also contribute to indoor air pollution and often contain phthalates, galaxolide, and tonalide.

Make an easy, DIY  air freshener instead! How It Works has this easy solution for a homemade car air freshener using your favorite essential oil. Or try a simple sachet: Treehugger has a simple tutorial on creating a lavender sachet.

Coffee & Water On-the-Go: Skip the plastic water bottles! Those convenient plastic bottles create 1.5 million tons of plastic every year. Also, the plastic may leech endocrine disruptors, which are linked to early puberty, infertility, and obesity. Invest in a reusable water bottle. The Daily Green recommends choosing an aluminum bottle with a water-based, non-toxic lining, and avoiding low-grade stainless steel bottles, which can leach metals. The same rules apply to purchasing a reusable coffee mug. Reusable coffee mugs are earth friendly, and budget friendly: Many coffee shops will offer free refills or discounts if you bring your own cup.

My answer is that ultimately, Black History Month is a chance to review who we are as a nation from a different angle. Black History Month belongs to all of us. It is, in fact, our shared history. For example, if not for Black History Month, when might you learn about Lewis Latimer, son of a slave who was so talented an engineer, that he worked alongside both Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, helping them achieve their signature inventions of the telephone and the light bulb? Knowing more about Latimer teaches us something, too, about those groundbreaking scientists Bell and Edison — at a time when too many chose to see Blacks as inferior in intellect, their brilliance extended beyond the science to the social.

Similarly, what woman cannot be inspired by the story of Harriet Tubman (from whom I took my nom de guerre at JackandJillPolitics.com — Jill Tubman) — slave, savior and spy? Tubman rescued her entire family from slavery — parents, nieces, nephews, sisters and brothers along with many more — despite suffering from a debilitating brain injury. She worked as a nurse and a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War and was a tireless fighter for the right of women to vote in America. We can all put ourselves in her shoes and marvel at the courage, compassion and determination of this diminutive heroine and mother — all of 5 feet tall.

Today, we’ve come so far from the dark days of slavery and civil war. Yet the legacy of inequity remains a challenge we must overcome as one society working together. According to the National Poverty Center:

The poverty rate for all persons masks considerable variation between racial/ethnic subgroups. Poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics greatly exceed the national average. In 2010, 27.4 percent of blacks and 26.6 percent of Hispanics were poor, compared to 9.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 12.1 percent of Asians.

Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2010, 31.6 percent of households headed by single women were poor, while 15.8 percent of households headed by single men and 6.2 percent of married-couple households lived in poverty.

Black families are more likely to be headed by a single woman and are more likely to be poor, according to the last Census in 2010. From The Root:

Nearly one out of every three black households (29 percent) are headed by a single woman, the highest percentage of female-headed households in the U.S….

The annual median income of black households in 2008 is $34,218, a decline of 2.8 percent (in 2008 constant dollars) from 2007. It’s the lowest in the United States.

Black median family income was just over $41,000 in 2008, the lowest in the United States of any racial group. A single black woman with children earned a median annual income of $25,958.

No surprise then that one out of five black families lives in poverty. More than 40 percent of black families headed by a single mom are poor.

This terrible inequity means that black families are less likely to have paid sick days, less likely to have access to affordable housing and adequate healthcare and more likely to be unemployed in a tough economy. Black unemployment remains twice that of whites despite our proven willingness to work hard and serve our country. Black women now represent a third of all the women in the armed forces, a rate twice their percentage in the civilian population. And more military veterans are black than of any other racial group.

We must all work to close these inequities because to do so is to live the example of Lewis Latimer and Harriet Tubman, who saw closed doors and worked to open them — not just for themselves but for all Americans. On behalf of MomsRising, I hope that this year’s Black History Month blog carnival inspires you — whoever you are — to higher heights.

It was a no-brainer for me: All the books said I should breastfeed my baby because it was best for her that she would be stronger, faster, smarter, better for it. And so I rushed out and bought myself a fancy Medella breast pump and stocked up on breast milk storage bags and got all giddy when I started filling out my nursing bras. (Um, yeah I was the president of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee and so the prospect of having boobies was a huge plus on my Reasons Why I Should Breastfeed list.) And I proudly told anyone who would listen that I planned to feed my child the natural way the way my mother’s generation and all the generations before hers did, too. The way God intended.

Um, yeah. The nurses at the hospital where I gave birth to my beautiful Mari had other intentions. I mean, in theory, breastfeeding made all the sense in the world for me and my baby. But in the real world, a.k.a. a hospital in the middle of Harlem, where the environment made doctors and staff more prone to assume that a young black woman pushing out a baby was single, poor, uneducated, and alone, breastfeeding just didn’t fit into the equation.

And so the nurse put my Mari in my arms and disappeared, leaving me for 12 hours with nothing more than my baby and a goodie bag full of coupons for baby lotion and soap, useless pamphlets, and two bottles of baby formula. I was absolutely terrified, overwhelmed, exhausted and clueless; I simply didn’t know how to feed my newborn child. No manner of picture/conversation/book chapter prepared me for The Show the actual breastfeeding of my baby. Was I supposed to be sitting any particular way? Pop in my boob any kind of way? Squeeze it to help get the milk into her mouth? Where was the milk anyway?!

I mean, I was convinced the baby would starve to death. And that she would die with a piece of my nipple in her mouth (those little gums were killer, especially when I unwittingly pulled my breast out of her mouth).

When a nurse finally made her way back into my room, she seemed surprised to find me breastfeeding. (She was also surprised that I had a husband, insurance, a good job, and that Mari was my first child more on this ignorance in another post.) Still, she made quick work of showing me how to get the baby to latch on, how to get her to stop sucking, and, most importantly, she gave me a number to La Leche League so that I could ask an expert questions on how to feed my baby the right way.

Getting the breastfeeding right wasn’t easy or natural; for the first two weeks, the skin on my nipple was literally shredded and my breasts were raw it was like a toothless little man was sucking on an open, achy wound. I’d smooth Lasinoh on my skin between feedings and sit shirtless with ice packs on my nipples, and literally cry out when Mari latched on.

But I didn’t give up.

Through the pain.

Through the doubts.

Through the pumping in the bathroom at work.

Through the ridicule from my more old school friends and family members who wondered loudly and unabashedly when I’d stop letting my baby suck on my ninny.

I breastfed my baby for 10 months, and pumped and fed her my milk for two more months after that, even after she stopped taking my breast. I was proud of myself for hanging in there. And proud of my daughter, too, for being patient with me. I know that it would have been just as easy for her to reject my breast. But she didn’t. And for this, I’m grateful.

There are plenty of moms who aren’t as fortunate who don’t have the benefit of expensive breast pumps and copious amounts of time to recuperate from the painful beginning stages of breastfeeding or halfway understanding bosses who give them time to pump or even a pamphlet’s worth of information telling them how it’s done or extolling its benefits. These are things that some of us breastfeeding moms simply take for granted.

Of course, there are plenty of moms who forgo breastfeeding to formula feed and this is their right. No judgment here. To each her own.

But I thank goodness that there are plenty of resources available for moms who do want to successfully breastfeed much
more than was available when I had Mari more than 10 years ago.

And for this, we should all be grateful.

For more information on breastfeeding from how to do it successfully to how to dress to what breast pumps to buy check out the March of Dimes website, which is rich with great information on this and many other helpful “bringing home baby” tips.

This blog post was donated by MyBrownBaby to the March of Dimes as part of its March of Dimes Moms initiative.

That the Latin definition of triumvirate translates literally into “of three men” hasn’t stopped my favorite triumvirate from being three Bessies: three very special sister-heroes who just happen to share the same name. I came to these women from very different directions, but they triangulate my ancestral altar in deeply personal and meaningful ways. For Black History Month, I’ll share “my” Bessies.

Of “my” Bessies, Bessie Coleman is the most famous. As a biographical sketch, Coleman’s story reads more epic than most novels. Born in 1892, she was near last in a Texas sharecropping family of thirteen. At 18, she left home for college, ran out of money after a year in school, then made her way to her brother’s in Chicago where she worked as a manicurist in a barber shop. It was the turn of the century and shop gossip was full of war tales, but it was the pilots’ stories that captivated Bessie Coleman’s imagination. She set her sights on France because they didn’t bar women from being pilots. By 28 years old, with a decent command of the language, she moved to Paris to pursue her dream of flying. In France she became both the first African American to earn an international license and the first African American woman with a pilot’s license of any sort. These wiki-like facts barely communicate her daring and gumption, or the huge fact that Black people were not a generation out of slavery. But know this too—this was pre-commercial aviation. People still sailed in her day. When she sailed back to the United States from France with the ability to pilot bi-planes, she realized she’d need to learn to fly stunts to make a living in the sky. So she sailed back to Europe, to the Netherlands and then Germany, where she learned to parachute from planes and do dazzling aerial stunts. She came home and wowed crowds at aviation stunt shows with her daring tricks known for their precision.

On the ground Black people couldn’t vote and traveled in segregated second-class train cars, but in the sky, Bessie Coleman was free. She died at a stunt show at 36. At 35, in honor of Bessie, I began taking flight lessons, flying small single engine planes, some of them built only a few decades after Bessie died. By 36 I’d flown solo, a promise I’d whispered to Bessie one day during my morning prayers. Whenever I fly, I keep a picture of Bessie above my magnet compass.

I came to know biracial South African novelist Bessie Head in the quiet solitude of the page. When Head was born to a wealthy white South African mother and a Black servant father in 1936, interracial marriage and sex was as illegal in her country as it was in the U.S. Her mother’s crime was so unthinkable to her family that they committed her to a mental institution and these facts of Head’s birth resurface in her work in important ways. In “A Question of Power,” a kind of auto-mythography, Bessie struggles with what we’d now call bipolar 2. Her interior space is crowded and sometimes untrustworthy at the same time that it takes a fine toothcomb through staggering themes about race and gender and wandering. Bessie lived much of her life as an outsider, and when she was forced across the border because of her political views, her 15 years as a refugee in Botswana only made her isolation more pronounced. Her novel “Maru” is at once a chaste threesome of a love story, but also the story of the outsider, whose difference relegates her to near slave-like status.

To say Bessie Head’s writing is sublime and nuanced is itself an understatement. I discovered her work at a time where I felt too big for where I was born, but tiny in the new island-city I’d chose to inhabit. Feeling lonely in crowded New York is damn near cliche, but still true. I was in my early 20s when I read “Maru”, and like the lead character I was in the breathless kind of in love that quarters you in one hour and radiates from your pores the next. Bessie Head’s writing was more than a revelation, it was a kind of salvation.

I came to Bessie Stringfield last, when I was profiling Black women motorcycle clubs for a now defunct women’s magazine. Among the black women bikers who know about Stringfield, she is a goddess. Born in Jamaica in 1911, she migrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She was adopted by an Irish woman in Boston when she was five after her parents died. By 16 she was riding motorcycles. By 21 she’d crossed the United States on her Harley eight times. Take a moment and wrap your mind around that fact. In the early 1930′s…a Black woman…rode her….motorcycle….through the 48 states….8 times. In one of my favorite pictures of Stringfield, she is laying atop her Harley the length of the bike. The truth is, she often had to sleep that way, outdoors, because she was riding cross country in a nation where Black men were confined to lesser quarters and there was no such thing as accommodations for a solo traveling Black woman. Still, I can’t imagine her feeling more free than she must have beneath the wide night sky, perched on her beloved motorcycle.

Like Coleman, Bessie Stringfield made a living on her bike competing in stunt shows and cycling races. Beneath a helmet and in layered protective gear, she could pass for a man and she often competed as one, daring the show’s organizer’s to deny her her prize after she removed her head gear to collect her money. She settled in Miami where she was crowned its motorcycle queen. Harley Davidson sponsored her in races and stunt shows. Bessie rode until she was well into her seventies. Though it’s long been a dream and I never felt more at one with the road than in the seat of a motorcycle, I decided not to purchase one when I became a mother. Still, I know the freedom the adventure of travel affords and I’m ever grateful for the fast and early way Bessie blazed the path of the wide open road. Ever fearless.

Last week’s findings of arsenic in organic brown rice syrup may be even more frightening to parents than last year’s discovery of the cancer-causing substance in apple juice. That’s because organic brown rice syrup is ubiquitous in natural products—it’s used as a substitute for high fructose corn syrup.

MNN reported on the Dartmouth study, which found concentrations of arsenic of 23 to 128 parts per billion (ppb)—12 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe drinking water limit of 10 ppb—in some cereal bars containing rice. (The EPA has not set safety levels for arsenic in food.)

High levels—as much as 20 times the EPA’s water safety level—were found in two organic infant formulas that contained organic brown rice syrup, leading Dr. Richard Besser, ABC’s Chief Health and Medical Editor, to recommend parents avoid formulas that contain the substance.

Where is the arsenic coming from? According to Environmental Health Perspectives, the arsenic is traced to residual pesticides, especially in areas of the southern United States where 1.6% of the world’s rice is grown; rice grown in these areas contain 1.76 times more arsenic than rice grown in California, for example.

We checked in with our team for advice on takeaways from the study; our advisors recommended that parents be aware, but not unnecessarily alarmed.

“This new study underlines the need for the FDA to set safety levels for arsenic in food and beverages,” said Dr. Alan Greene, author of the “Raising Baby Green” book series, founder of the White-Out movement and a Healthy Child Board Member. “For now, I recommend that rice not be the primary source of calories for babies, and that whatever rice they do get comes primarily from California and/or is tested for arsenic. Avoid conventional rice from countries still using arsenical pesticides. And, of course, I will welcome safety limits for arsenic in food and beverages that take the health of babies and pregnant women into account.”

At press time, two organic baby formula manufacturers released statements. Earth’s Best wrote that their formulas “do not contain brown rice syrup.” Nature’s One said that they depend on a “qualified, world renowned, third-party, independent lab to test arsenic levels in their organic brown rice syrup. Their testing results report undetectable amounts of arsenic at laboratory testing limits.”

Finally, because arsenic is present in our water supply in varying amounts, especially if you are using powdered formula mixed with water to meet your infant’s nutritional needs, you may want to check levels in your area. The Environmental Working Group provides a valuable resource to not only check the levels in your area, but also to find out which water filters can remove arsenic.

Discrimination against pregnant women is finally beginning to get the national attention it deserves. Last week, I and others urged the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to issue guidance to clarify the rights of pregnant women at work. Such guidance is sorely needed. An op-ed by Dina Bakst published a few weeks ago in the New York Times noted that “thousands of pregnant women are pushed out of jobs that they are perfectly capable of performing — either put on unpaid leave or simply fired — when they request an accommodation to help maintain a healthy pregnancy.” The stories from some of the growing number of cases that have been filed in the last several years speak for themselves.

In a 2006 Texas case, an employer threw up his hands and said “What are we going to do now?” when he found out Deanna Stansfield was pregnant. At O’Reilly Auto, where she worked, women were encouraged to get men’s help when lifting heavy objects. But once she announced her pregnancy, Deanna was told she could no longer seek such help. When she brought in a note from her doctor limiting her lifting to 20 pounds, her employer first asked her what weight he had told her she would need to be able to lift to keep her job, and then, after some indecision, decided that she would have to lift 50 pounds.

Sometimes employers are more subtle. In a 2004 suit, Lochren v. Suffolk, a police department routinely staffed desk and other light duty positions with officers who could not perform “full police duties.” The department grandfathered in 36 male officers who had been on light duty for years. But light duty was not available for pregnant women. They were given the option of going on leave or remaining on patrol without bulletproof vests and gun belts—the department did not provide either in sizes suitable for late-term pregnant women.

Some employers insist on limiting pregnant employees to light duty even when the employee herself insists she is ready, willing, and able to do her regular job. An example is a 1999 Kansas case, where a firefighter was promptly removed from her job after she announced her pregnancy, and her request for a return to full duty was ignored. This kind of discrimination was declared illegal in the 1970s. Yet “one of the biggest complaints from female sworn officers is that when they notify their department that they are pregnant, they are removed from their position,” according to a report by the National Center For Women and Policing titled “Recruiting and Retaining Women.”

At the Center for WorkLife Law, we hear from women denied light duty, both on our hotline and in our database, which has over one hundred cases involving denial of light duty. Often employers force women onto leave very early in their pregnancies. Then all the employer has to do is to wait until her three-month leave period is up and fire her for job abandonment.

Why do pregnant women need light duty? Women’s joints soften during their pregnancies, making them more susceptible to back injuries. Light duty is vital for some women. Other women are ordered onto light duty by overly cautious doctors who may well be worried about potential malpractice suits if anything goes wrong with a pregnancy. Doctors need to recognize that ordering a pregnancy-based work restriction can jeopardize a mother’s access to pre-natal health care and her ability to feed and house her baby. Of course doctors should order restrictions when they are necessary, but doctors need to think carefully about what’s necessary and never, never “recommend” a restriction without ordering it. That’s a recipe for job loss. Doctors need to remember that 41% of all children, 53% of children born to women under 30, and, and 73% of children born to black women are born out of wedlock. Many, many pregnant blue-collar women do not have a partner to support them. Even if they do, many, many blue-collar families need both parents’ jobs to pay the bills.

In a 1999 case, the New York City Transit Authority offered light duty to an officer who had been injured while scuba diving, another who had been injured while jogging, a third who was recovering from foot surgery, and a fourth who had hurt his hamstring—but denied light duty to an officer who was pregnant. In a 2011 case involving the United Parcel Service, the employer gave light duty to male employees who had lost their licenses due to drunk driving—but not to pregnant women.

Do you believe these things still happen today? Equality for mothers is still a heavy lift.

It’s a volatile mix.

And right now there’s a growing drumbeat of attacks on universal access to full coverage for crucial contraceptive health care that cannot be ignored:

• The Panel: You’ve likely seen the picture that shocked our nation last week: An all male “expert” witness panel testifying about birth control before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
• The Bishops: You’ve also likely read about the Catholic Bishops and other religious leaders objecting to the part of the Affordable Care Act (health care reform) that calls for ending co-pays on birth control and other preventive health services. The end result was a compromise exempting religious employers who object to contraception from paying for birth control directly, with insurance companies picking up the cost. But the Catholic Bishops don’t like the compromise either, and now they’re taking the fight farther.
• The Candidates: And, you’ve likely heard the comments of Presidential candidates attempting to use women’s health for their own electoral gain. Check out this quote by one of the current Presidential candidate frontrunners, Rick Santorum,

“One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea … Many in the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that’s okay … contraception’s okay.’ It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal … but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen.”

• The Aspirin: And I’m sure you didn’t miss Foster Friess, the man behind a Super PAC for Rick Santorum, saying in an interview on MSNBC that, “Back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. An aspirin joke. That’s all he’s got when there’s so much at stake?

Reliable birth control that permits women to responsibly control how many children to have, and when to have them, has been nothing short of revolutionary–not just for women and mothers, but for our country as a whole. It’s improved the health of women and their families, as well as given women and mothers increased access to economic and political power unlike any other time in history.

One of the primary reasons why we began the Free to Breastfeed project was because we believe it’s deeply valuable to normalize breastfeeding, in private and public. In doing so, we open the door for the message about the incomparable benefits of breastfeeding. Even more importantly, we create the space for our families and society to consider how to better support mothers who breastfeed, whether or not they also work outside of the home. Remember, at present almost half of women who work outside of the home do not currently have the legal right to pump milk at work.

All of this is a major reason why we poked fun at some of the uninformed and insensitive comments we receive from family and strangers alike with this video:

Whether or not to feed a child breast milk is clearly every woman’s own choice. We’re just doing our part to create a world where women are empowered with correct information and support to make the choices they feel best. You can help by being kind and helpful to nursing mothers and supporting initiatives like this one to protect the right of all mothers to pump at work.

On one hand I feel great pride in having a month dedicated to celebrating my heritage. It is during this time that the strong black voices of our past are remembered and uplifted.

However, early childhood experiences with black history lessons taught in the classroom negatively shaped my self image for years. As an adolescent black female raised in a predominantly white middle class community in the mid 1980s, classroom discussions of black history were anxiety-ridden, eye-twitching events. Back then, black history was minimized to just a few school district approved topics such as George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr. with some mention of the Civil Rights Act and slavery. The topic of slavery was especially painful as I would listen to the teacher lecture almost anecdotally about how my ancestors were brought to this country. Absent from the lesson plan was any meaningful discussion on the long-lasting consequences of marginalizing an entire race of people by treating people of color as if they were not fit to be in the company of polite society. If I carried those early ugly negative images of my heritage taught in public school with me for years, I would imagine that non-blacks might, too, in spite of Black History Month. What, then, is the goal of Black History Month?

Black History Month in its current form is a technical approach to glorifying a timeline of black historical persons whom have contributed, through their novel innovation, to U.S. society. This is supposed to instill in black children a sense of pride, inspire a work ethic and a foundation upon which they too can build and achieve the “American Dream.” The problem is many find it difficult to identify with historical figures because most of us are not the direct beneficiaries of their invaluable experiences, knowledge or success. This is courtesy of families being forcefully disbanded pre-and-post Civil War era to the detriment of being able to truly trace and embrace our history. Seemingly, as with the passing of a generation, the importance of understanding and actively weaving lessons learned from the past into the fabric of our collective future is lost. Unfortunately, a month dedicated to the efforts of the black community is not sufficient.

With the success of a minority of black entertainers, athletes and a President of the United States, mainstream society insists that people of color “have arrived” and that our struggle is over. What black people are finding is that the goal posts have simply been moved. There is just a different discriminatory tactic that many African-Americans have not had adequate preparation for.

Black History Month’s goal is to educate those within and externally to the black community about our contributions and achievements. This is in hopes of tempering some of those negative images we all carry regarding black culture and history. It may be unrealistic to expect any lasting social impact following one month of “black history.” This should be expanded to include blacks in the national conversation all year round. This should be the single greatest priority within the black community as no one else will promote our agenda of acquiring adequate housing, job equality, education and healthcare — if we do not. Our issues cannot wait until the month of February…the coldest and shortest month of the year.

About two years ago I sat down for a conversation with TheGrio.com discussing the role of discrimination and testing in promotion and hiring in fire departments. While it may appear to some to be idiosyncratic, the battles being waged in America’s firehouses are harbingers of things to come regarding diversity and public employment. I talk about this more in-depth in this piece “Fire Department Discrimination Burns African-Americans.”

As a child, I can remember my favorite toy at my local New Haven Head Start was a firefighter helmet. I was convinced that when I grew up that I would be put on a bright yellow coat, red helmet, and save the lives of people, cats, and burning properties that were on the brink of disaster.

For me, those dreams of being a firefighter waned over time, but for many other African-Americans the dreams of rising as a firefighter have been forced to give way due to discriminatory promotion and hiring practices. While these issues are not new, they are now getting more national attention due to rising numbers of court cases and challenges to outdated hiring and promotion practices.

New York Times: Black firefighters permitted door-to-door outreach

Fire departments are far from bastions of diversity. Despite their location, many firehouses do not have a diverse composition of fire fighters and when fire fighters are hired, promotion is a difficult process.

In the case of cities like New Haven, Saint Louis, New York City and areas like North Hudson remain in heated debate about who gets hired and promoted. What fire houses are dealing with is what most public institutions will soon have to deal with the question of “who do we hire and how do they move up the ladder?”

For many years, it’s been thought that standardized entrance and promotion exams were the most equitable way to create a firehouse, police barrack, or other civil service units but this consistently being found to be untrue.

With legal challenge after legal challenge piling up, cities are realizing that decades old practices must be updated to consider the composition of the citizens that firehouses serve as well as the skills that are need to serve well. Exams and place based hiring, while efficient for cities, may not be serving the greater good of preserving property and lives.

One of the most controversial and highlighted cases of the complexities of creating diverse quality firehouses comes from the city of New Haven, Connecticut. In the mid 2000s, the City of New Haven’s Fired Department became enwrapped in a landmark lawsuit regarding “reverse discrimination” in promotion and hiring.

In 2004, the City of New Haven’s fire department administered an promotional exam where the top scorers were disproportionately White and there were few top scores who were Black and Latino. Worried about the unevenness of the results and the potential bias of the exams, the city’s Civil Service Board refused to certify the results of the test and use them as the basis for promotion.

The city’s decision to not certify the results was not simply about being good willed towards black and Latino fire fighters, instead the city feared if the test was the sole measure used for determining promotion the city would have a discrimination suit on their hands from black and Latino firefighters who had not faired well on the exam. Seventeen white and 1 Latino firefighters sued the city for discrimination (Ricci v. DeStefano 2009) for not accepting the results of the test and promoting them.

In the end, the Supreme Court sided with the firefighters and eventually the firefighters who had not been promoted were granted damages of 2 million dollars. While this is one decision, the controversy is far from over as a set of black officers are still suing New Haven for the use of the exam which has not been found to be racially unbiased.

Diversity and hiring and promotion is not simply a black-white issue. In the North Hudson section of New Jersey the Newark NAACP recently won a legal victory on hiring practices which seemed to pit black applicants against Latino applicants. In the North Hudson area, which includes North Bergen, Weehawken, West New York, Guttenberg, and Union City, to be hired as a firefighter one had to be local resident.

Through careful statistical analysis the claim that changing hiring practices that would allow qualified non-resident black applicants to be hired would disadvantage Latinos was largely inaccurate.

The expert testimony and analysis suggests the perceived harm of changing practices is often greater than the actual harm and smaller than the benefits that that would occur by a change in practices.

With each twist and turn, cities and fire departments around the nation are wondering what should be done to not only avoid legal battles but create a diverse units. While there are not easy solutions, it is important that city’s realize that the quickest way to thin a pool of applicants is often not the best method.

Entrance and promotion examinations often have less to do with doing a job well than many have come to believe. Just like the common assumption that SATs were good predictors of college success has been challenged, so must the tests used in promotions and hiring.

As communities diversify, the civil service sector must take special care that diversity is reflected in leadership and membership. Issues of racial inclusion and exclusion are not new in fire departments but now there is a chance to change how the positions are filled from volunteers to chiefs.

Yesterday’s methods of hiring and promotion will not produce tomorrow’s great results. Creating assessments that are more closely tied to what jobs demand such as field tests could go a long way in ensuring greater equality of opportunity.