A Space for Grey People
According to the United States Department of Education, students can be black or white, this or that, but not grey. Of course, grey people are sensitive to this blatant form of discrimination, and advocates for all 2.4% of us who don’t fit into neat little categories like This or That have started a movement to get the government (and, by extension, colleges and universities, human resources departments, and the like) to make a space for grey people. A space to check, that is — like a little box.
When the first official U.S. census was taken in 1790, there were two kinds of Yanks (according to the Census Bureau) — White and Negro. In 1850, the choices expanded to White, Negro, and Mulatto and by 1890, the Census Bureau was counting Quadroons and Octoroons.
Nearly 100 years went by before the U.S. Dept. of Education started requiring schools — both public and private — to report on how many of their students were White or Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, or Native American/Alaska Native, and each of those groups was given its own little checkbox on official forms.
Now Mulattos and Mestizos and other grey people want a box of their own. In a gesture of accomodation, the Dept. of Education has decided that students — including law school students — should be able to check more than one of the five official boxes. But that’s caused a bit of an uproar amongst grey people and their advocates.
Gary Orfield, director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project doesn’t like the check-as-many-boxes-as-you-like concept because it would put a dent in the Project’s ability to track college students by race. Alfred Padilla, education manager at the Seattle-based Mavin Foundation doesn’t like it because when students check more than one box, “it renders their specific heritage invisible.”
The reason is that, so far as the Dept. of Education is concerned, if a student checks more than one box, then — unless he or she is Hispanic — he or she is going to be lumped into that category that 2.4% of us chose in the last census — “two or more races.” According to that scheme, Blaxicans will be lumped in with Eurasians and Jatinos and Hawanese, and that doesn’t sit well with the Mavin Foundation, which advocates on behalf of Afropeans and such. The group’s objections to the check-as-many-boxes-as-you-like concept is detailed in a report it issued last year titled One Box Isn’t Enough.
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And what does all this have to do with Law Firm Diversity? I suspect that — one way or another — it’s going to impact how law firms report the ethnicity and race and sex and sexual preference of their attorneys a few years down the road. As it stands, law firms now report just two sexes — male and female. In the future, they may have to report (and recruit) other categories. Rather than asking first-year associates if they’re black or white or yellow or brown or red, they may have to ask them for details on shades of grey. Instead of a checkbox for Hispanic, they may have to offer checkboxes for Latino and Chicano as well.
Or perhaps all this complex complexion counting will result in something fairly simple. A form with just two checkboxes for race — Human and Other.