‘Diversity’ Looks a Lot Like Old-Fashioned Discrimination I was barred from top law firms as a Harvard student in the ’60s. Today Asians face similar prejudice. By Michael Blechman
At 76 I am old enough to have experienced the old-fashioned kind of discrimination. It happened in 1965, when I was in my second year at Harvard Law School. I was looking for a job as a summer associate, a rite of passage that generally leads to permanent employment. I remember feeling pretty confident, having ranked 40th out of 530 in my first-year grades.
I applied to the four law firms I considered the best—all “white shoe” firms in downtown New York. I arrived at each interview in my best suit, hair trimmed and shoes shined. The interviews went smoothly, but at no point did anyone offer me a job. By my last interview I figured I must be missing something, so I asked instead what his firm was looking for in an associate. I recall that he looked at me in silence for about 60 seconds, as though trying to figure out a polite way of explaining the situation. He told me that the most important thing for any lawyer was to be able to relate to the clients, and that of course it is always easiest for clients to relate to lawyers who are like themselves.
It had taken four wasted interviews, but I finally understood. I went from that last firm to my apartment and took out a telephone book. I knew of three so-called Jewish law firms in New York at that time, so I called the one that came first in the book, Kaye Scholer, and asked to speak to the hiring partner. Though it was 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, he asked if I could come over right away. An hour later I was interviewed, first by him, then by a preppy-looking partner with a bow tie, and finally by the firm’s administrative partner, who offered me a job. I accepted on the spot.
After working at Kaye Scholer that summer, I joined the firm as a regular associate in 1966, became a partner in 1975 and stayed there until I retired two years ago, when it merged into a larger firm. Thanks in part to a Fulbright year I had spent in Berlin, I developed a large practice representing German clients—people who were not at all like myself—the very thing the white-shoe firms had assumed I could never do.
After I began my job, I found out that many of the older partners had experiences similar to my own. Some had been hired by downtown firms but left when they realized they had no future there or when an anti-Semitic partner blackballed them for partnership. Firms like Kaye Scholer benefited enormously from the downtown firms’ bigotry.
Since my experience in 1965, all of the firms at which I had interviewed have overcome their prejudices and now hire and promote Jewish lawyers, as well as women, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Kaye Scholer became similarly diverse.
Yet as the old kind of discrimination has died out, a new form has emerged—this time under the banner of “diversity.” It’s good to open opportunities to people who were previously excluded. But promoting “diversity” by discriminating against nonfavored categories of people seems quite a different thing.
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