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KahlilWilliamsSecondPaper 5 - 18 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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This is a revision of Jenai St. Hill's first paper. Aside from minor grammatical changes and added links, I put forth some options for Black lawyers should they choose to work for a law firm and value diversity. In addition, I used the Wilkins/Harris pieces in a slightly different way. | | | Conclusion
There are options available to those of us who want to go to law firms, but value diversity. However, they will require us to make changes by using both words and actions. We may use our licenses to force firms to develop better practices once minorities arrive at firms, select firms on the basis of their commitment to meaningful diversity, or start our firms altogether. But to point the finger at law firms while accepting a fate of assimilation or devaluation is a mistake. Should we choose not to seize the power that we have, we are no less responsible for mere lip-service to diversity than the firms themselves. | |
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- I think this is a good edit. Jenai's first draft was a good draft, and I agree that this was an improvement. I think I find myself here left pretty much where her response to my comments left me: you're right that you have now got a chance to do what was really hard to do for any African-American person before. You could now get the high-prestige high-money partnerships in big law firms in which even the traditional ruling white people are unhappy. Moreover these firms are now being transformed out of existence or into serious trouble by irreversible changes in the economic organization of the profession. Given that the firms are failing, that one can see by looking at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that the American power structure is changing, that there are lots of ways to make comfortable livings doing interesting and socially-responsible work that don't involve living within white-dominated organizations, and that the big firms make people unhappy no matter what skin color they have, I'm just not convinced that "to abandon that journey in law school seems foolhardy." On the contrary, it seems like plain good sense to me.
- Which isn't to say that I think you and Jenai have somehow missed the point. I think we're talking about a real and important consequence of the present period of rapid social change, which makes reconsideration of basic conclusions advisable. The objectives you choose for your life should be built upon the realities now, and your reasonable guesses about your future, not the objectives selected at an earlier moment, as "the places we would go if we were allowed to go where our talents take us." Those were the right objectives then, as other objectives might be the right objectives now, when at true long last, after centuries of hoping, we can honestly say that for you, having gotten where you have gotten, there is nothing to stop you from going anywhere you choose to go.
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