An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  One bureau student summed up the difference between the two approaches succinctly. He said piously, “When I really take my time to do the pleadings just right, doing the research, talking to professors, I just feel better about it. That way, when Mrs. Jones gets that new sink from the landlord, I know I made that happen.” Shouldn’t it be Mrs. Jones’s happiness that mattered?

  I went to the first couple of Coalition for Civil Rights “silent” vigils for diversity outside the faculty meetings. I use sneer quotes because they were the loudest silent vigils imaginable; it is impossible for Harvardians to shut up, so in love are we with the sound of our own voices. One vigil was especially loud because a Vanity Fair reporter was there working on a piece about the nastiness of HLS politics. Most of the crowd was throwing bons mots the reporter’s way, hoping to get interviewed. No way was politics going to come before publicity.

  I laugh at them, but I also had to laugh at myself. I hadn’t known that at the culmination of each vigil, as the faculty meeting began, the group would shout en masse, “No justice, no peace,” several times before disbanding. I scurried away as the shouting began. Silly, I know, but I was thinking, They’re having a meeting. It seemed rude and just a little silly to me. Now consciously my father’s daughter, I had no trouble tracing this facet of my personality back to its source. I might as well have shook my fist at those “heathens” from a car window. That man is inescapable. It’s just that now, I don’t fight the weight of him.

  On another occasion, I got a call to help read a list of names of professors of color that HLS should consider appointing. Typical students, they called scant hours before the faculty meeting and I had a dental appointment. Also, name-reading? It sounded dubious to me. The next day, the campus was in an uproar. It turns out that the name-reading was a guerrilla tactic. We hadn’t been invited or allowed to read; CCR had stormed the meeting and demanded to be allowed to read hundreds of names. The person who’d called had left that little detail out. There was a heated standoff with lots of yelling, scuffling, and the ritual exchange of self-justificatory letters in the Record.

  That kind of activism just doesn’t work for me, especially when CCR’s main justification after the fact was that if they’d simply been allowed to read the list (HUNDREDS of names), there’d have been no problem. Unlike my compadres, though I have no personal use for this type of activism, I can see the value of it. Even if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t consider those who do to be sellouts if their beliefs are otherwise intellectually and morally defensible. I’m not threatened by those who see the world differently than I do; I simply leave this facet of the struggle to others and, as with the law firm drones, am grateful that someone else has that covered.

  ——

  So ridiculous can the Harvard left be that sometimes blacks and liberals joined together to produce a spectacle so ridiculous, knee-jerk, and insulting, it made you want to join the Federalist Society just to piss them off. The showdown at an obligatory sensitivity training session my second year was one such spectacle.

  Surprisingly enough, Harvard students had been known to offend the poor, largely immigrant Hispanic community the Legal Services Center served in Jamaica Plain, Boston. In response, this training had recently been instituted. The facilitators were a white man and a black woman with that special brand of earnestness which can only be found among car salesman, Amway reps, and . . . well . . . diversity training facilitators.

  I hate sensitivity training. The USAF had required a healthy dose of it. I have never known it not to bring out the worst in everybody. This time was no exception. We were put through our paces in a series of gooey, goofy exercises like ones where students were culled from the audience to name things which were good and which were bad about whatever facet of their identity they were there to represent. The audience was not allowed to criticize what they said, only to praise it. For instance, there was a “man,” a “woman,” a “liberal,” etc. I knew we were in trouble with the next panel.

  ——

  Representatives from the different economic classes were called for. Much as I hate that kind of touchy-feeliness, I volunteered to be the working-class representative because, as usual, my classmates were letting things drag on and on by not participating. But no one would admit to being either middle class or upper class. Imagine that. At Harvard. Our earnest facilitators gave up on the latter, but finally a black friend confessed to being middle class and took a seat onstage.

  After a little more torture of this type, just before the break, the facilitators had us count off by eights. All the ones would go to this room, the twos to that, and so on. That was all we were told about this exercise. My favorite radical, sitting in the back of the room with the rest of the blacks, said that the blacks wanted to have their own separate group. The room froze. The facilitators, wide-eyed with surprise and muted fear, immediately caved. You could have heard a pin drop.

  I was sitting up front with the black radical who had dismissed my nonpolitical columns and considered all law-firm blacks sellouts and the white lefty who hated capitalism and anyone who wasn’t working hands-on with poor people of color. We three joined our integrated groups (where we were given crayons to draw our own personal flags) and then all rejoined the beleaguered main group.

  Our facilitators led the way in pretending that nothing had happened, though the temperature in the room seemed to have dropped to freezing. One of the HLS Head Negroes, the very personification of the BLSA mentality and a virulent racist to boot, took a fiendish delight in interrupting the resumed session to suggest we discuss what was obviously on everyone’s mind, to wit, the black secession from the union. She’s the kind of black who likes to terrorize whites.

  Because no one else would, my three-woman group criticized the blacks’ actions as counterproductive and needlessly divisive. They’d had no idea what the breakout session was about—how could they be sure race would be in any way relevant or helpful? What had they done in their blacks-only group: drawn straws for the red, black, and green crayons? It seemed to me simple masturbation and a pseudo-Marxist sideshow—a great big middle finger to a group of people they knew would be too afraid to answer back.

  This division seemed a special betrayal because we’d all just survived six weeks of a boot-camp-like, grueling Trial Advocacy Workshop where we’d had a crash-course, round-the-clock introduction to trial work. We’d all had to act as each other’s witnesses, jurors, judges, cocounsels, and opposing counsels while we undertook that special trial by fire. At its end, we’d all felt closer to each other than to anyone else at HLS. We’d seen each other at our best and worst; we’d been forced to work in concert with people we hadn’t known, or liked, or respected before. We’d come out of the experience buoyed and warmed by one of the few instances in which HLS was not a cold, impersonal knife fight for primacy. With that request for a separate-but-equal black-only group, all that evaporated. This inexplicable pulling away made our earlier camaraderie, born of shared suffering and teamwork, meaningless.

  My white friend was emotional on this point, saying how hurt she felt now that the bond we’d thought transcended race among the group had been severed. She was brave, she was eloquent. But to no avail. She was slaughtered. No white could criticize blacks; the other whites in the room outdid themselves chastising her for her insensitivity and racism. They reduced her to weeping. The way they leapt on her while looking to the black section for approval was appalling. My other friend and I were, of course, immune to criticism—we’re black. We were heartsick knowing what was and would be said about us among blacks, but it would have been the height of cowardice to have remained silent in the face of such blatant race-baiting.

  Of course, race-baiting is in the eye of the beholder. The woman who had made the original request, bless her radical soul, cried, so overwrought was she as she explained her motivation. As well, several other blacks were very reasonable in their defense of the group’s actions. The most often given explanation w
as that wanting to be in a black-only setting was no reflection on whites or their individual views on integration. It was the Plessy v. Ferguson (the turn-of-the-century case which justified Jim Crow) defense: if segregation makes you feel bad, then there’s something wrong with you because our purpose is not to make you feel bad but only to be alone with other blacks. Some invoked diversity itself—the blacks-only group boasted mothers, the disabled, foreign-born blacks, etc. How dare we limit the universality of blackness? Several of the blacks invoked the special knowledge that only blacks have. The virulent racist talked about how far beyond whites she was in the area of racial understanding, that there was no way useful dialogue could take place in an integrated setting.

  This from the same woman who asked me where I got my hair braided, then grimaced with disgust when I directed her to a ghetto kitchen in Mattapan. “I’m not going down there,” she nearly spat on the floor. Never mind that Michelle, the lovely child-woman who braided my hair, was a lily floating atop sewage. Never mind that her mother shot her father in the groin; never mind that her crackhead brother had seven neglected kids by a fellow crackhead who, when sober, stalked the family with such intensity they moved constantly; never mind that her sister was an alcoholic who stumbled around their ghetto home like a wraith. Michelle, on the other hand, didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, had no kids but two jobs plus braiding and nothing bad to say about anyone. Michelle was why I’d come to law school. Why had this silly little woman come? After two years, I knew why: to be the kind of leader the black community can no longer afford and should no longer defer to, two Harvard degrees (and a quicksilver intelligence) be damned.

  In their defense, I completely understand the need to escape white scrutiny. I’ve been the racial Lone Ranger since I was nine. No one knows better than I the weight, the sheer pressure, of doing everything their way than I do. No one knows better the spotlight we exist in for not being white. I’m sick of explaining “ashiness.” I’m sick of balding white stockbrokers with swirl-pattern comb-overs saying petulantly, “I just don’t get the things you people do to your hair.” I’m sick of whites crashing into us while mangling the electric slide and throwing everybody off.

  It’s bad strategy and ultimately pointless, though, to try to make a statement with that kind of in-your-face separatism. We are a minority. That means, put very simply, that there just aren’t very many of us. If we leave the ghetto, we will always be few. Filling up a closet with black people for a half hour at diversity training just won’t change that. But we do have a right to a place of our own. That’s why I joined BLSA; I knew no whites would come there. Even though I rarely went after first year unless there was an issue I cared about, I kept my dues current because it was important to know that there was a majority-black place I could go if I wanted to. What I didn’t know was that no white could come there. BLSA wasn’t majority-black; it was blacks only. No whites allowed.

  Scandal was brewing at HLS; right-wingers were making an issue of the fact that BLSA received law school funding but limited its membership to blacks only. I certainly hadn’t known that; most of us hadn’t. I had to get out the BLSA bylaws and see it with my own eyes before I could believe it. But it was true. I belonged to a racially exclusive group. I’d never consciously thought about it, but just assumed that whites avoided BLSA because they always avoided large groups of blacks and thought other issues more relevant. Certainly, those things were true, but, ultimately, beside the point. I belonged to a group that excluded by race.

  I went off to split my second summer between the firm’s New York and San Francisco offices, hoping that the issue would just disappear. That, when we all returned, the rules would just have magically rewritten themselves and rendered the issue moot. On the train to New York, I had hours to consider how different my attitude toward a whites-only group at HLS might have been.

  ——

  Shearman’s New York office is huge—hundreds of lawyers, hundreds of admin staff, from catering to cleaning, to reproduction, to messengers. Hostility was in the air; the legions of secretaries, Xeroxers, and paralegals considered themselves royally mistreated and underpaid and I agreed. Many of the lawyers were rude, dismissive, and thoughtless with the staff, too caught up in their own misery, deadlines, and long hours to consider anyone else’s problems. I was caught in the middle of the class struggle. Most of the nonprofessional staff looked at me suspiciously, my guilt presumed and associated with the years of self-absorbed fancy-pants lawyers who’d preceded me.

  The secretary assigned to me was so hostile, so lazy, and such a clock watcher, I eventually stopped asking her to do anything but my diaries (lawyers track their time in six-minute increments—we scribble in diaries all day, making sure to account for every billable nanosecond). When I asked her to show me the program that my diary entries had to go into, she had enough pride left to be embarrassed. She snatched it from me: “I’ll do it!” It was the only task she performed for me all summer. I once heard her bleat to a caller, “Aw! Take a message? Can’t you just call her back?”

  Doing my own administrative work was simpler than constantly riding herd on her. What little she did, she did sloppily and usually incorrectly; I couldn’t let my name go out on it. The first few weeks, before I gave up, I’d watch her eyes go angrily narrow as I gave her some instruction—she wanted to spit in my eye, it was quite obvious. She was bitter, but she was also scared. She needed the job but she expected to be dissed (“Who the hell is this Little Miss Harvard?” I heard her sniff on the phone to someone my first morning there). She was black; I had thought that might help. Instead, I think it made her dislike me more.

  Is this what will happen to that hardworking girl from the DNC cafeteria? I used to wonder.

  Eventually, she thawed toward me somewhat—smiling when our paths crossed, asking a few questions about my life—but I never did toward her. I had no respect for her. She only started liking me because I didn’t require her to do her job. She was rarely even at her desk. So she gave me a start the day I looked up to see her in my doorway. I had only a few days left.

  Blunt and nervous, she demanded to know what sort of evaluation I was going to give her.

  She was holding the form clenched in her fist. Her face looked like it had the first few weeks, when she thought I might abuse her or try to make her work, both prospects being equally unpleasant.

  I asked her, “Do you realize that this is the only thing you took the initiative to do this entire summer?”

  She drew herself up with a hiss.

  “Aint nobody begging you for nothing. Say whatever you want,” she spat, and left.

  I never saw her again. I saw her coat appear and disappear. Noticed that her computer was off when it had been on, and vice versa. I heard her slip into her chair, talk on the phone, disappear again. But I never saw her.

  My last day, I left the signed but otherwise blank form on her desk with a Post-it that said, “You fill it in, then you will have accomplished two things.”

  I was dreading a repeat performance of the class struggle at the San Francisco office. As usual, I had a different problem that I would never have expected.

  The San Francisco office was small, fewer than twenty lawyers and perhaps thirty admin staff. There were only four or five summer associates.

  My first day, the hall outside my office was dead. But every day the rest of that week, the foot traffic was downright distracting. Eventually, I noticed that I was seeing only black faces. Then I realized that I was seeing the same black faces over and over again. The fifth time I saw a black woman with a head full of wild, unprocessed hair turn away just as I looked up, I called out, “Enough already. Get in here.”

  One of the admin staff shuffled in, chuckling ruefully.

  She spent the next half hour explaining to me how to get my hair like hers. I’d let my hair go natural in 1992 without any idea of what was going to grow out of my scalp. Two years later, I still had not quite mastered its intricacie
s; she was my black hair consultant.

  That day, I had lunch at one of San Francisco’s trendiest, most expensive restaurants. The next, I was eating from a plastic tray at a cafeteria with five black women from the word-processing pool.

  “We just had to see which kind you were,” one teased in response to my jokes about being stalked.

  “Hmmm, I’m not sure what you mean. Which kind of what?” I said, wide-eyed with fake innocence. “Oh, which department? Hi, Debra Dickerson, Mergers and Acquisitions,” I deadpanned, holding out my hand for a shake.

  They laughed. I did too, but I knew this was shaky ground. Whose side was I on? Because I knew no one can possibly be on both. I couldn’t bring myself not to associate with them (I wanted to associate with them, they were fun and down-to-earth), but I’d worked too hard to deny myself the perks of my newfound position—like ruining some word processor’s evening with extra work at the last minute if that’s what I decided was required. I listened while they filled me in on office politics, often belittling partners or associates I liked. I was walking a tightrope. I could see it stretching out before me.

  As we were coming back from one of these lunches one day, a partner passed our group. He looked so confused, I could almost hear his thoughts: What is a summer associate, a lawyer, doing with typists? What’s wrong with this picture?

  So be it, I thought. If he wants to hold it against me, if my work suddenly seems less competent to him, I’ll move on. Nobody tells me with whom I can socialize.

  He stopped by my office just a few hours later. He was delighted by “this turn of events.” He was happy to see the “rapport” I had with the “staff.” Diplomatically, he explained that there’d been a few “misunderstandings” in the past and he thought it was great to have me to run interference.