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Like everyone else in America, you undoubtedly know about the recent afternoon shutdown of 8,000 Starbucks stores for anti-bias training after the well-publicized handcuffing and arrest of two black men who asked to use the bathroom at an outlet in Philadelphia, an event partially caught on video. But did you know about the white woman who called the police to report on black men supposedly violating park regulations by barbecuing near Lake Merritt in Oakland, California -- though no arrests were made, the police arrival also became a viral video -- or the community response to that incident, a far larger BBQing While Black event sponsored by local restaurants? Or the white owner of a golf course in Pennsylvania who called 911 and demanded that the police deal with five brand-new members, black women who, he insisted, were golfing too slowly? Or the black member of a New Jersey gym and his guest who were "profiled," reported to the cops, and ejected from the health club (an event also on video), though apologies later followed? Or the four "creative professionals," three black, leaving an Airbnb with their suitcases when reported as possible burglars and taken in by the cops in Rialto, California? (Video captured the incident and a lawsuit against the police is now in process.) "Got surrounded by the police for being black in a white neighborhood" was the way one of them, Donisha Prendergast, a filmmaker and a granddaughter of Bob Marley, described the incident on Instagram.) Or the black graduate student who fell asleep while studying in the common room of her dorm at Yale and was challenged by a white student who promptly reported her to the campus police (producing yet another confrontation and viral video)? Or former Obama-era White House staffer Darren Martin who was called in by a neighbor as a possible armed robber while moving into his new apartment in New York City with clearly marked boxes all around him? (No video available.) Or the four high school slam poets in the group Muslim Girls Making Change, invitees all, who were waiting in back of the Burlington Elks Lodge in Vermont to perform when a club officer phoned the local cops? ("I called the police on you. They're coming right now and I told them you're doing drugs.")
Though there are evidently no numbers available on just how many calls of this kind 911 operators (and police departments) field, there can be little question that they are the norm, not the exception. They are, in essence, calls to preserve racial boundaries etched into this society over the centuries. And versions of such thinking are similarly etched into American institutional life as lawyer Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College in New York, makes clear in her second TomDispatch post when considering who goes to law school, where they go, and what they pay. Tom
Minority Lawyers Hanging From Their Own Bootstraps
How Law Schools Fail Those Who Seek Justice
By Erin L. ThompsonLaw school applications are up this year in what some are calling a "Trump Bump," since around a third of applicants were inspired to apply by Trump's election. Nearly half of them identify themselves as members of a minority group. They've seen lawyers fighting Trump administration policies that discriminate against their communities and want to do the same. If these minority applicants succeed, they could change the balance of power in American society. If they fail, they will find themselves crushed under a lifetime of debt. But few are aware that they are taking this enormous gamble in a rigged game.
On average, minority students end up in lower-ranked law schools, which they pay more to attend than white students, resulting in higher debt burdens. Minority law graduates have lower bar exam passage rates, employment rates, and income levels. Given the intense competition for paid social justice positions, few of them will end up in careers where they can support themselves while fighting for the ideals that brought them to law school in the first place.
Legal education has failed and will continue to fail minorities. This shouldn't be surprising, since the entire American system of restricting admission to the practice of law has long been designed, explicitly or implicitly, to exclude minorities. Nowadays, of course, minorities are no longer simply prohibited from entering law school. Instead, the system loads many of them with staggering debt before killing their hopes, leaving them hanging from the very bootstraps they had hoped to use to rise.
Attack on the Night Schools
If you want to practice law today, you minimally have to graduate from college, then law school, and then pass a state bar examination. This is a far cry from 1851, when, in the grip of the anti-elitist ideals of Jacksonian democracy, Indiana declared that all of its citizens were entitled to practice law, the only requirement being "good moral character." Not until 1932 did that state concede that its lawyers might need some other training -- and this wasn't as unusual as it might seem. Before the turn of the twentieth century, the vast majority of America's lawyers had never attended the few law schools that then existed. (Most of them had not gone to college and some hadn't even completed high school.) Instead, like Abe Lincoln, most apprenticed in a lawyer's office and read up on state laws before passing a short oral bar exam. Apprentices had to persuade a lawyer to take them on, had to pay him, and could not perform other work to support themselves while apprenticing.
The early twentieth century saw an explosion of new law schools founded to serve the needs of those for whom such conditions were daunting, especially minorities, recent immigrants, and women. Generally located in urban centers, those schools charged low tuition and were staffed with practicing lawyers who taught after working hours, so that their students could earn a living.
There was widespread horror at the prospect of night schools allowing a horde of undesirables to become lawyers who might charge cheaper fees and so undercut mainstream attorneys. As a result, the Association of American Law Schools, representing the more expensive, university-affiliated institutions, banded together with the American Bar Association (ABA) to campaign for states to raise the requirements for aspiring lawyers. The target: keeping minorities out of the profession.
Shortly after World War I, for instance, a New York lawyer argued that it was "absolutely necessary" to require law school applicants to have attended college or the country wouldn't have lawyers "able to read, write, and talk the English language -- not Bohemian, not Gaelic, not Yiddish." Similarly, at a 1929 ABA meeting, a member claimed that the majority of complaints received by the Philadelphia Bar Association concerned "Russian Jew boys" and insisted that "these fellows that come up out of the gutter" be required to complete a college education to "absorb the American ideals."
The process of restricting admission to the bar took decades. In 1923, although most aspiring lawyers attended law school, no state required them to do so. Only in the post-World War II years did all but a handful of states insist upon a law degree for everyone who wanted to practice in the legal system. Meanwhile, the ABA would be appointed the accrediting body for law schools in almost all jurisdictions and the cheaper, more accessible night schools would either close up shop or transform themselves into elite clones as best they could -- and raise their tuitions to match.
Why do Minority Law Students Pay More for Worse Educations?
In 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, only 1% of American lawyers were black. Other minority groups had so few lawyers that the numbers weren't even tallied. Since then, those figures have steadily increased, but the percentage of minority students in the elite law schools that offer the best chances for a prestigious, well-compensated career remains far lower than at non-elite ones. (The same has been true of women: while, in 2016, female law students outnumbered males for the first time, only six of the top 20 law schools had at least half-female student bodies.)
The reason: Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores. Minority and underprivileged students have consistently had lower average LSATs than white and wealthier test takers, even when other ways of measuring their abilities and achievements did not show a difference. There has been much debate about the causes of this score gap. The expense of the preparation courses that teach LSAT-taking skills is certainly one reason. Others suggest that the test itself has hidden racial biases, since it calls for analyses that might be performed differently by those with different backgrounds. (Or perhaps not so hidden: as late as 1986, LSAT takers had to answer questions about a reading passage set in a country where slavery was legal, featuring slaves who insisted that they found their condition "extremely pleasant.")
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