Yesterday, as the California wildfires raged — and still are — the American Right settled on an explanation for how they happened and why they got so bad. This time, rather than getting all scientific and claiming that they happened “because God was super mad about all of the abortions and gay sex,” they have decided that the real problem is “not enough racism.”
Adding credence to this explanation was Adam Carolla, who used to host a show on Comedy Central featuring female dancers called “Juggies.” Carolla claimed that he actually tried to join the Los Angeles Fire Department when he graduated high school, only to be told they couldn’t hire him because he was a white male.
“Geez. I want to talk about my white privilege so badly,” he said. “I graduated North Hollywood High with a 1.7 GPA and could not find a job. I walked to a fire station. I was 19 and living in the garage of my family home and my mom was on welfare and food stamps. I said, ‘Can I get a job as a fireman?’ and they said, ‘No, because you’re not Black, Hispanic or a woman and we’ll see you in about 7 years.’”
Do these people ever get tired of not understanding what the term “white privilege” means?
Now, normally I would say that it’s difficult to prove a personal experience to have been false. What do I know about Adam Carolla’s life? But in this case it’s actually pretty damned easy.
Adam Carolla is 60 years old. This means that he would have been 19 in the year 1983 (when, let’s note, Ronald Reagan — who worked to roll diversity efforts back — was in office). While the Los Angeles Fire Department was under a consent decree to hire more Black people starting in 1974 when they represented only five percent of the force, the percentage of Black firefighters was still only eight percent in 1980 (the order was not lifted until 2002, when they finally hit 13 percent). It’s not known what the percentage of female firefighters were at that time, but judging by the fact that the city did not even put in women’s locker rooms and restrooms into firehouses until around 2000? It seems fair to assume it was not very high.
So I’m just going to take a guess here and say that they probably did hire some white men here and there. Just not Adam Carolla.
Right now, there are around 3,246 uniformed personnel in the LAFD. Thousands of people take the test to apply every year to fill a very limited number of spots. For instance, in 2014, 10,000 applied (though only five percent of applicants were women and 10 percent were Black). Now, what are the odds that the LAFD had time each year to take every white male who applied aside and say, “Hey, sorry, but we can’t hire you because you’re not Black, Hispanic or a woman,” while still maintaining a fire department that was still overwhelmingly white and male? How is that even possible?
Even today, women make up only about three percent of the LAFD. In 2015, the LAFD was described as still overwhelmingly white and male despite the fact that white people only make up about 28 percent of the population of Los Angeles.
Oh! And let’s talk about the lawsuits. Because a big part of the reason the LAFD has, in recent years, started to more actively recruit from populations largely unrepresented in their department, is because they had a lot of racial and gender discrimination lawsuits, and that kind of thing is not just a bad look, it also costs a lot of money.
In 2007, the city had to pay $2.7 million to a Black firefighter who had been harassed at work by his colleagues, who even went so far as to put dog food into his meal. The fire chief at the time also had to step down.
In 2024, arson investigator Afara Lalaind, the only woman on her squad, sued the city for “a hostile work environment and lost opportunity for advancement.” Lalaind had previously served six years as firefighter-paramedic and assumed she’d be treated decently by her new squad. She was very wrong about that!
Via the LA Times:
On her first day, however, she was instructed by the station’s captain, Michael Boutte, to work a three-person fire engine operation by herself while the rest of the station observed, according to the lawsuit. Lalaind also claims she didn’t receive keys or standard operating guidelines that day, as is customary for new employees. […]
Lalaind alleges that Boutte attempted to prevent her from seeking another position at Fire Station No. 57 within months of her arrival, instead favoring a temporary employee.
Lalaind eventually wrote to a fire chief about the position, leading Boutte to accuse her of “going over his head,” the lawsuit alleges.
In 2021, a group of six Black firefighters filed another discrimination suit against the LAFD, alleging that, even that recently, the department did not, actually, suffer from any shortage of racism whatsoever.
Via the Los Angeles Daily News:
The LAFD “has a very hostile attitude toward and disdain of its Black workforce and regularly engages in adverse employment actions against them, including sham investigations, false allegations of workplace misconduct and failure to promote and investigate complaints of workplace mistreatment and discrimination and to consistently apply workplace policies and rules,” according to the suit, which further alleges the department is governed by a “good old white boys club” where Black employees are “abused, denigrated, ignored and disrespected.”
The LAFD’s decision-makers tend to be white men who “hold very racist and bigoted attitudes and do not believe in diversity, equity or inclusion in the workplace,” the suit alleges. “Those minorities who don’t play their game are abused and mistreated in the workplace and their work lives are made miserable.”
The city later settled with them for $3 million.
That same year, LAist ran an investigation into the kind of harassment female firefighters experienced on the job:
It was soon after she returned to work at her Los Angeles Fire Department station from a medical leave. Someone had vandalized her yellow work jacket, spray painting “JUNK” across the back. A printed photo of a dead rat was left inside the women’s locker room.
And one day, she says, she opened the duffle bag where her bedding was stored (on-duty firefighters sleep at the station), and a putrid smell hit her like a ton of bricks. Raw chicken had been stuffed inside and the spoiled meat was attracting flies. Maggots crawled out of her blankets and sheets.
Also in 2021, the federal government actually got involved, due to the high number of complaints about racial and gender discrimination. It would have been very difficult to pull all of that discrimination off if they had been hiring primarily people of color and women from 1983 on.
The math, as they say, is not mathing.
Adam Carolla actually wants us all to believe that a fire department with a decades-long ingrained culture of discrimination against Black men and all women actually told him, in 1983, that they were not going to hire him because he was a white man, while still hiring primarily white men for the position he was looking to fill.
I’m sorry, but no.
The only possible explanation for why anyone might have told him that was because they were trying to soften the blow of rejection — which does happen, though probably not in cases where there are thousands of applicants, if only because “who has the time for that?” But I’m gonna say he’s probably just lying.
In fact, given these lawsuits, I’m going to very confidently say that not only was Adam Carolla definitely not rejected for being a white male, but that insufficient racism is definitely not the reason for why the LAFD has had a difficult time with these fires. Both of these things are logistically impossible, no matter how desperately some may want them to be true.
I don’t know, I think they’re really going to have to go back to blaming natural disasters on abortions and gay sex, because that’s at least slightly less difficult to conclusively prove wrong.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
It's so easy being a woman. Even though I'm middle-aged and far less physically capable than the youngsters they generally hire, I walk into fire stations all over the place and demand a job, AND THEY JUST GIVE IT TO ME. It's awesome!
A GPA of 1.7? From high school?
Nice self-own there, slick.