(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your servant has been writing about ''race norming'' for several years now but has frankly been surprised by the recent attention given this highly esoteric issue in our nation's capital. We have a theory about what triggered the current agitation. Race norming, also known by the instantly forgettable designation ''within- group percentile conversions,'' is the practice of adjusting the scores of employment tests to ensure that each racial group gets its share of the jobs. It all began in the Seventies, when various folks in the U.S. Department of Labor began worrying about the fact that minority groups generally scored lower than Caucasians on the job tests used by employers and state labor departments. To help blacks and Hispanics get more jobs, DOL encouraged the practice of reporting scores only in percentile terms -- and setting up separate percentile rankings for each ethnic group. For a while, this practice could be justified by the possibility that the tests were somehow biased against minority groups. But in 1982 and again in 1989, panels set up by the National Academy of Sciences reported that the tests were unbiased -- that they predicted performance equally well for whites and minorities. Which made it impossible to think of race norming as anything but reverse discrimination. So now the Republicans want to write a ban on the practice into this year's civil rights bill. The Democrats are terrified by the issue but still holding out against a ban. The House Judiciary Committee went against a ban by 21 to 13 in a straight party-line vote in which nobody had to justify his position. When the issue comes to the floor, the Dems will have no place to hide. As to what galvanized political and media interest in the issue, we suspect the turn came when the discussion got beyond theory and began to zero in on certain awful details. Early last year, a Virginia journalist named Robert G. Holland got his hands on the tables used in converting raw test scores into percentiles for the General Aptitude Test Battery (used by most state employment agencies). Holland's report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch showed that a raw score of 300 on a test for bus drivers, say, puts blacks in the 83rd percentile, Hispanics in the 67th, whites and Asians in the 45th. The Virginia Employment Service would report these percentiles to prospective employers, most of whom would not know they were getting massaged figures. Can the practice be defended in the upcoming congressional debate? While worrying about the talent for blather on a certain side of the aisle, we doubt it.