Raising the Bar: Increasing and Sustaining Diversity within the Hennepin County Legal Community
Professional paper for the fulfillment of the Master of Public Affairs, Master of Public Policy, and Master of Urban and Regional Planning.
Workplace Racial Discrimination and Middle Class Vulnerability
Middle-class minority workers have skill and human capital credentials which should confer protections and relative workplace power. Moreover, they often work in more bureaucratic contexts where culturally proscribed status markers, such as race, should matter little if at all. In this article, we challenge such assumptions by quantitatively and qualitatively examining several hundred cases of workplace racial discrimination and the degree of middle-class African American vulnerability. Notable are significant levels of firing discrimination for all African American workers and a heightened likelihood of mobility-based discrimination and day-to-day racial harassment for middle-class African Americans. Through qualitative case immersion, we show the core practices and processes through which these patterns manifest.
Admitted But Not Accepted Outsiders Take an Inside Look at Law School
Commencement exercises, May 1989. Three hundred new lawyers are about to enter professional life, trained by Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, to assume their positions within the legal elite. The setting is auspicious-Berkeley's imposing Greek Theater. The weather is balmy. It is indeed a proud day for many of us at Boalt: students, parents, partners, offspring, teachers, and friends. We've made it through! We look out against a sea of black gowns, a patchwork of black mortarboard caps, graduates indistinguishable beneath them. In the halls of academe, tradition appears intact. A closer look reveals that this description is not quite accurate, that this picture is misleading, as full of contradictions as law school itself. The black robes attempt to establish uniformity where none really exists. Beneath the mortarboards are faces of men and women of Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Latino, Chicano, and mixed heritage. Students of color comprise over 25% of the class. Almost half the graduates are women. Other distinctions exist as well, although they are less apparent. Students range in age from early twenties to late forties. They have different class backgrounds, different academic backgrounds, differ-