Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  Certainly, in law—as in other professions—when blacks are asked how they are doing, they consistently say they are not doing nearly as well as whites tend to assume. In 1992, when the Association of the Bar of the City of New York surveyed minority associates at the city’s major law firms, the pollsters found that blacks in particular felt isolated and neglected.

  Largely as a result of the efforts of Conrad Harper, president of the association, 169 law firms and corporate law departments had signed a “Statement of Goals” the previous year pledging to improve retention and promotion rates for nonwhites and calling for a 10 percent minority hiring rate between 1992 and 1997. The 1992 survey, conducted by a subcommittee of the Committee to Enhance Professional Opportunities for Minorities charged with implementing that agreement, was far too small to yield firm generalizations, including only twenty-three blacks, twenty-one Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, nine Hispanics, three “others,” and three who did not give their race. Nevertheless, its findings were consistent with the stories I heard in my own research, and with virtually every survey I have seen that has tried to assess the feelings of black professionals. And the picture it painted was sobering.

  Sixty-one percent of blacks felt their work experiences were “clearly different from [those of] nonminority lawyers” at their firms. Only 9.5 percent of Asians/Pacific Islanders and none of the Hispanics felt that way. Thirty percent of the blacks said they were “judged differently from nonminority lawyers,” with another 30 percent unsure. Only 20 percent unequivocally said they were judged in the same way compared to 89 percent of the Hispanics and 76 percent of the Asians/Pacific Islanders. Sixty-one percent of blacks thought their firms had a poor “commitment to the retention of minority lawyers,” as did 67 percent of Hispanics and 29 percent of Asians/Pacific Islanders.

  In a statement released with the survey, Harper said: “The implication of this modest, not scientific yet persuasive survey, augmented by the undeniable lack of advancement of African-American lawyers to the partnership level, is that such lawyers perceive far more race-related barriers to their professional development than do other minority lawyers. . . . To communicate openly across cultures requires a comfort level that does not presently seem to exist in law firms.”

  That observation was driven home by an accompanying bar association report, which stated, “Most law firms, no doubt, believe that they have created an environment in which the perceptions described in the survey would be unwarranted. However, the fact that these perceptions may come as a surprise is explained by some of the comments made in follow-up interviews. . . . A third generation African-American lawyer described himself as not feeling ‘entitled to complain’ because he was ‘lucky to be there.’ ”

  Harper, the first African American elected to head the association, was made a partner in Simpson Thacher & Barlett in 1974. At the time, there were only two other black partners in major New York law firms. Over the years, the number has climbed to more than thirty. And through that entire period, Harper said, he had often heard black associates complain of being treated “differently.” He and the handful of other black partners saw the bar association’s foray into survey research as part of a process of making the profession “more hospitable to blacks and other minorities,” and of underlining the point that simply hiring black associates was not the same as putting them on an equal footing with whites.

  That Harper, Francine Soliunas, Sharon Collins, and the others quoted above should find so much evidence of corporate inhospitality to blacks may be a matter of skewed perceptions, or of what Senator Moynihan insists is a tendency of middle-class blacks to wallow in a “legacy of grievance . . . inappropriate to their condition.” Another possibility is that the grievances are real: that corporate America, in ways more persistent and pervasive than most whites realize, is playing a cruel trick on those who thought they could escape the curse of discrimination simply by adhering to the rules; that what the would-be trailblazers discover is that following the rules carries few guarantees—for those of any race; that while a good education, hard work, and high performance can increase the odds of success, a host of other factors, having nothing to do with ability or merit, ultimately dictates how high one can rise; and that those other factors often differ as a function of race.

  Part of the problem, as management consultant Edward Jones pointed out, is that though Americans constantly “talk about merit . . . we can’t even define what it is.” Outside of sports and certain technical specialties, merit tends to be defined subjectively, primarily by attaching complimentary labels to those who are thought to be meritorious: people who are “fast starters,” who “have potential,” who show style or demonstrate leadership or otherwise have the mystical “right stuff” that will take them to the top. Once they have risen, as predicted, it is assumed they did so on merit—a reassuring if circular assumption. But what it fails to take into account is the real possibility that merit, objectively defined, has relatively little to do with who gets ahead.

  A 1984 study by sociologist James Rosenbaum (published as Career Mobility in a Corporate Hierarchy) took a hard look at career advancement in one large company. Rosenbaum, who had full access to personnel records, tracked one cohort’s progress through the corporation over a thirteen-year period. In the end, he had processed some 20 million discrete pieces of data and had concluded that careers developed very differently—and along much narrower tracks—than generations of management had assumed.

  Whereas management (and employees) believed that good work could be rewarded at any stage of a career, Rosenbaum found that early job assignments and early promotions had an enduring influence “independent of the most salient individual attributes.” In other words, those who were designated as “fast starters” did significantly better throughout their careers than others—irrespective of actual ability or performance. He also discovered that people tended to be categorized very quickly, often before they were aware of it. “Even employees who were on the fast track learned about it gradually. . . . They reported noticing the extra attention they were receiving, they began to infer that they were getting special treatment, and later they realized that they were advancing more quickly than their peers.”

  This process, noted Rosenbaum, was in important respects just the opposite of the meritocracy many assumed to be operating. For if there is to be true equality of opportunity within a corporation, “employees must know the rules of the game, they must start at similar positions, and they must be allowed to begin the tournament when they are ready to compete.” His findings, he said, “raise doubts about each of these points.” He added that a system that tracked employees so early in the process was “particularly weak at discovering errors of exclusion. It does not have any way to bring former losers back into the competition for top positions.” The likelihood of worthy employees being excluded was compounded, he observed, in “sponsored” programs, in which management selects workers presumed to have high potential and moves their careers along. Yet many large corporations, and certainly most major law firms, operate in precisely this way.

  Conrad Harper, for instance, recalls that early in his career he did not realize that he was being groomed for success until one of his firm’s eminences pulled him aside and told him he would be working very closely with a certain senior partner. “There is no such thing as a self-made partner in a major law firm,” Harper says. “One cannot advance in places like this without a godfather.” But as Rosenbaum found, a system based on mentorship, or on early tracking of future corporate stars, “carries the risk that the term ‘high-potential people’ does not so much describe a type of person as it describes a predefined role to which some individuals will be assigned regardless of their personal qualities.”

  Some of Rosenbaum’s research was foreshadowed by sociologist Robert Merton, who explained the concept of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” in a famous article in The Antioch Review in 1948. His inspiration came from W. I. Thomas�
��s observation that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequence.” A series of studies in the 1960s and 1970s explored the concept in the classroom and found, at least in some instances, that student performance seemed to be largely shaped by teacher expectations. According to Ray Rist, who investigated a predominantly black school in St. Louis, “If the teacher expects high performance, she receives it, and vice versa.” He found that once students were tracked into ability groups—largely on the basis of appearance and dress—there was virtually no movement either up or down.

  Rosenbaum’s study, an analysis of general career mobility, was radically different from Rist’s, but he too found that once people were put into tracks, they tended to stay in them. And while his research was not designed to look specifically at race, his findings have clear racial implications. If in fact blacks tend to be tracked into certain areas, and if in fact blacks are therefore destined to progress more slowly than whites, and if in fact the real reasons for advancement have less to do with ability than with attributes one is a priori assumed to possess, then it is only to be expected, given certain widespread racial assumption in America, that very few blacks, however accomplished, manage to get near the top of the corporate hierarchy.

  Furthermore, if in fact many whites get ahead in large part because they are beneficiaries of a congenial stereotype (which presupposes that executives and corporate lawyers are white), of early high-profile job assignments (which whites are more likely to get), of mentors (whom whites have an easier time acquiring), and of wide latitude to fail (but also to triumph), then it should not be much of a mystery why even those blacks who do get into corporate management sometimes feel so bitter.

  In career development, as Rosenbaum notes, the loss of even a few years can be critical. And yet, if the testimony of those I interviewed is to be believed, blacks almost automatically lose the years it typically takes to make a corporation comfortable with them. By the time the corporation finally does become comfortable and acknowledges abilities, the fast trackers (who are almost always white) have already moved on—so that even the most talented blacks often end up in slower lanes. When someone like Basil Paterson says, “It’s too late for me,” he is not speaking for himself alone, but for thousands upon thousands of other blacks who wonder how much better they would be doing in a fairer world.

  If the phenomenon of the false meritocracy were a thing of the past, Moynihan’s dismissal of black middle-class discontent would make a great deal of sense. But the little evidence that exists on blacks with fast-track credentials indicates that for whatever reason, they generally are not getting on the track, certainly in nothing approaching the proportions of their white peers. And given all the stories of disappointed young achievers who walk away from corporations in disgust, like Professor Bell’s black MBAs, it seems premature, at the very least, to pronounce their problems little more than figments of their collective imagination.

  This is not to say that blacks are altogether faultless. As Illinois Bell’s Francine Soliunas put it, “I don’t think it is all corporate America’s making. I think we have had opportunities to perhaps build stepping stones to that [glass] ceiling to break through and we’ve choked . . . by not learning what it is that we have to do in order to break though, and not being willing to do it because of some fear, real or imagined, that we will compromise our blackness or our femininity, or whatever else it is.” Nor am I arguing that corporations or major law firms are openly hostile to blacks. Naked hatred and open hostility are—thank God—largely relics of a wretched past. Still, many institutions and the individuals within them have trouble seeing blacks in the same light in which they customarily see whites.

  Ross Perot demonstrated that in 1992 when he addressed the national convention of the NAACP and persisted in referring to blacks as “you people,” dwelling on anecdotes of his parents’ personal kindnesses to black hobos and blue-collar employees. No one accused Perot of being a racist—if a racist is defined as one who hates another racial group. What he was charged with was unwitting condescension, with assuming that simply because his audience was black, it would relate to stories about black bums—which implied that in Perot’s mind the most important bond between members of the audience was an interest in the benevolence of whites towards blacks. It is hardly conceivable, for instance, that he would have addressed middle-class whites as “you people” or regaled them with stories of his father’s generous treatment of tramps, whatever their color.

  Corporate America is full of people like Perot, people who, without intending to create racial hurdles or hostility, manage to create a fair amount of both. That they cannot see what they have done is due partly to the fact that they meant no harm and partly to a disinclination to examine whether the assumptions they hold dear are in accord with reality.

  In December of 1992, in an elegy for the demise of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the New York Times editorialized, “On July 29, 1981, millions of Americans rose at dawn to watch a young woman who actually looked like a princess (golden hair, blue eyes, and a whopper of a tiara) marry a prince who didn’t exactly look like one (he’s no Tom Cruise). But what the heck. The music was swell, St. Paul’s Cathedral never looked better and, all in all, it was the kind of wedding that even money can’t buy.” No one with any sense would argue that running a major American corporation is equivalent to being the Prince of Wales, but senior corporate executives and senior partners in law firms are also expected to conform to a certain image. And though their positions may not require golden hair and blue eyes, they do require the ability to look like—and be accepted as—the ultimate authority. To many Americans that image still seems fundamentally incongruous with kinky hair and black skin.

  State Secrets

  The New Yorker, May 29, 1995

  CALVIN TRILLIN

  When it comes to the operations of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, I have always been partial to the smaller stories. Consider, for example, the Grenada, Mississippi, baby inspection. In the early sixties, a white woman in Grenada, a county seat in the north-central part of the state, gave birth to an out-of-wedlock baby, and there were rumors around town that the baby had been fathered by a black man. The State Sovereignty Commission had been established by the legislature in 1956, in the days when the white South was erecting its defenses against the decision of the United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation in public education is unconstitutional. The Commission was charged to “do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the federal government.” Being an agency that always interpreted that mission broadly, it dispatched one of its investigators, Tom Scarbrough, to see if Grenada had truly been the scene of what Southern politicians of that era tended to call the mongrelization of the races.

  After interviewing a number of Grenada residents, Scarbrough accompanied the local sheriff for an inspection of the baby under suspicion. It’s easy to envision those two officials of the State of Mississippi trying to edge in close to the crib—large men, as I imagine them, with the sheriff wearing a pistol and further burdened, perhaps, by what people in regular contact with the Southern law-enforcement community come to think of as a sheriff’s belly. In Scarbrough’s report, which ran four or five thousand words, he wrote, “I was looking at the child’s fingernails and the end of its fingers very closely.” From this I assume that he believed African ancestry could be detected by the presence of distinctive half-moons at the cuticles—a theory that was an article of faith in my grade school in Missouri, during a period when I was also persuaded for a while that Japanese people had yellow blood. The baby’s fingernails might have been too small for a conclusive half-moon search. Scarbrough said in his report, “We both agreed we were not qualified to say it was a part Negro child, but we could say it was not 100 percent Caucasian.” Perhap
s sensing this indecision, the mother parried shrewdly: the baby’s father, she said, was Italian.

  Even as a connoisseur of the smaller stories, I acknowledge that the big stories do carry a certain impact. Officially, the files of the State Sovereignty Commission remain sealed until a lawsuit to open them, which began in federal district court in 1977, is finally resolved. But the activity surrounding the suit has already dislodged formerly secret information that has resulted in front-page headlines about stories that made front-page headlines the first time around. It is now known, for instance, that an early black applicant to the University of Southern Mississippi who was convicted of several crimes and thrown into prison was framed; an alternative plan was to murder him. It is known that during the 1964 trial of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers the Sovereignty Commission investigated potential jurors for the defense and furnished such capsule biographies as “He is a contractor and believed to be Jewish.” It is known that the Sovereignty Commission got weekly reports from paid spies within the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), the umbrella organization of the 1964 voter-registration effort known as the Mississippi Summer Project, and that it distributed license-plate numbers of COFO cars, including the one that Michael Schwerner and James Chaney and Andrew Goodman had been riding in before they were murdered, in Neshoba County, that summer.

  In 1990, such stories, based on State Sovereignty Commission documents, ran for eight pages one day in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, which reported not only that a black newspaper editor had been on the Commission’s payroll—one of his duties was to run a story, furnished by the Sovereignty Commission, that linked Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Communist Party—but that the Clarion-Ledger itself had routinely killed stories that the Sovereignty Commission wanted killed and run stories that the Sovereignty Commission wanted run. According to a memo quoted in the Clarion-Ledger in 1990 by Jerry Mitchell, the reporter who revealed many of the Sovereignty Commission documents, the Commission had even prevailed on the Jackson newspapers to drop the honorific “Rev.” from the names of ministers who were civil-rights activists: “Our friends of the press could drop their titles from news articles and if queried they could say they do not consider them as ministers ‘as how can a man profess to serve God when he is actually serving atheistic Communism?’ ”