The New York City Fire Department defended a decision to exclude a white 9/11 first responder from an all-black color guard procession.
Lt. Daniel McWilliams was one of three firefighters famously photographed raising the American flag amid the 9/11 rubble in 2001. The FDNY’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Cecilia Loving, defended the department’s decision to not include him in a color guard procession in 2017 because he is not black, the New York Post reported Saturday.
Exclusive: FDNY official defends excluding famed 9/11 officer from ceremonial procession for being white https://t.co/PZMKYe5kAQ pic.twitter.com/wFKG7hrFMa
— New York Post (@nypost) July 25, 2020
The color guard procession was for a memorial mass remembering members of the Vulcan Society, a group of black New York City firefighters, and the society’s president reportedly told McWilliams to “help in a different capacity” during the event so it could feature black responders.
McWilliams subsequently filed a complaint arguing that he was discriminated against based on race, prompting Loving to testify at a state Division of Human Rights trial.
“So, a request for an all-black color guard is not discriminatory?” McWilliam’s lawyer, Keith Sullivan, asked during the trial.
“No, it isn’t,” Loving replied, according to the New York Post.
Loving added that it was acceptable to replace the white firefighter to “uplift our identities and our separate ethnicities in order to instill a sense of pride and community and support for one another.”
McWilliams’s lawyer slammed the incident for what he described as a double standard.
“If you’re black and you discriminate against a white person in the workplace, you get a slap on the wrist at best,” he wrote in a brief. “The FDNY has created a policy and procedure for bending over backwards, coming up with excuses and accommodating members of the Vulcan Society … who commit racist acts, and it has to stop.”
