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Things That Make Me Crazy
I started my career in Big Law but have now had my own small firm for 25 years. I’m still amazed by the tone-deafness and hypocrisy of many large law firms. I’ve been watching them (and corporations) fall all over themselves to express solidarity with BLM. Today, I saw one firm solemnly issue a “Statement Against Racial Prejudice and Injustice.” They quoted MLK: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” How noble of them.
So, just for my own amusement, I went to their website to see how many African-American partners they had at the firm. One-hundred-sixty-three lawyers in total, six African-Americans, two African-American partners.
Constantly getting lectured by hypocrites sure is exhausting.
Published in General
But isn’t their virtue signaling so uplifting? I feel so much better just reading your post.
That’s 3.68%. Hmmn, what is the percentage of blacks in the US population?
Be careful what you wish for. There is a push to make everything 50:50 (in terms of women too) to the detriment of standards and quality. If these businesses and firms start getting called out on the hypocrisy of their virtue signaling then they’ll start trying to recruit 50:50, and then qualified white men will be hung out to dry. (I say this as a woman, ex-liberal). It will be properly Maoist. We’ll hang signs around their necks and smash their glasses.
@Tocqueville “Maoist” is the right way to put it. We’re literally being told what we can and can’t read now. There was an NPR post yesterday saying we should “decolonize” our bookshelves. NPR: “In essence, it is about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long.“ Arrrrgh
I guess I find the hypocrisy reassuring rather than otherwise. It shows that despite the propaganda they both consume and propagate, they haven’t lost touch with reality. They aren’t about to put an affirmative action hire in a position of real responsibility when it could cost them millions of dollars.
Contrast that with our municipal governments, who will sacrifice everything to the idol of diversity. That includes basic competence, so you end up with cops who hurt people not out of racial animus, but simply because they aren’t good at their jobs. The result is riots and lawsuits. Which I guess Big Law is ready and able to take on.
My law school prides itself on now having a 60% female student body. But it still gives preferences to women…
Injustice, huh?
Where is “justice” in having one’s business burned down by some strangers coming by with some personal grievance?
Since when does the small minority get to determine what constitutes “justice”, and the rest of the population is simply expected to accede to it, whatever it is? (Not to mention pay for it all.) I thought this was something a society does together.
I do not have any support for BLM or respect for any of their supposed grievances – they seem like a terrorist organization to me, or at least criminal. Beside the fact that such support smacks of racism to me.
I have zero support for Antifa, for the same reasons. (Not the racism part.) They remind me of the fledgling Nazi Party in 1929 (I just watched Babylon Berlin) – a bunch of thugs who would hire out to whoever was trying to destabilize the new democratic government of Germany. They were dismissed as a mere annoyance. Who knew what would happen only three years later when they actually took power? And what happened after that?
I have zero support for a “Black”cause or issue. (Or a White cause, or a Gay cause, or a . . .) What the hell would a “black” issue be? Other than maybe sickle-cell anemia, what would be a cause that would affect a person just because he’s black? The idea of a “black” cause smacks of pure racism to me.
I have FULL support for the cause of individual Americans, whatever their race. My heart is open to individuals, and we can all work together on our problems. But Race should be irrelevant to the Government.
And signalling is so much less work than actually doing something.
Zuckerberg announced he will only hire firms with certain diversity characteristics, so firms must advertise political correctness. Zuck should improve his influence and announce that only Black lawyers will be allowed to work on Facebook cases and issues. That will really show White people!
It’s interesting that the idea for his company started as a way to ogle women at Harvard. That doesn’t seem very woke.
Yes, Facebook started for exactly that purpose for the consortium of Boston colleges. I remember a friend of mine who was at Smith showing me. At that ancient time, 1999, the colleges issued a literal Facebook and it was basically a reference for looking up cute freshmen girls (and guys, to be fair).