What I Learned About Inclusion and Why It Matters

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT INCLUSION AND WHY IT MATTERS By: M. Akram Faizer

LMU Law School

BECOMING AN INTENTIONAL CHANGE AGENT

As a racial, ethnic and religious minority immigrant to the U.S., I have been privileged with opportunities that far outstripped what would have been available to me in my birth country of Sri Lanka. My 20 years as a lawyer, however, have educated me on how elusive diversity and inclusion can be. For most of my career I have been, sometimes uncomfortably, the only racial minority in the room. My professional and personal development has been undermined as a consequence. The discomfiting truth, however, is that I certainly could have been more committed to inclusiveness and cultural competence.

There was not one African-American partner at the multi-tiered law firm of nearly 400 lawyers I worked at in Buffalo, NY, and LMU Law currently has no faculty and few students who are African American. To remediate this requires not only intent, which has long been there, but an improved understanding of the underpinnings of racial imbalance, a further understanding of how to change and then becoming an intentional change agent.

The evidence of our profession’s collective failure to integrate minorities is striking. Eighty-five percent of lawyers are White, while only 5% are Black, 5% Hispanic and 3% Asian.1 Although 67% of law school graduates are White, they account for 79.4 % of federal judicial clerks as compared to 3.5% for Blacks.2 This is partly explained by the federal judiciary’s lack of training and cultural competence: 39 of the 94 districts consist only of White judges. Blacks make up only 1.83% of partners at multi-tier law firms and only 1.24% in firms with fewer than 100 attorneys.3 While Asian Americans, at 11% of associates, comprise more than half the racial minority associates nationwide,4 the rate of Black associates, at 5.1%, has been stagnant for more than a generation.

Of course much of the problem precedes entry to law school or the profession: 90% of Black schoolchildren attend underperforming majority-minority schools that receive $23 billion less in aggregate funding than majority-White districts with the same number of children.5 The median LSAT for Blacks is 142, as compared to 153 for both Whites and Asians. Black law students are typically admitted to law schools that charge higher tuition, resulting in median student loan debt for African American graduates of $207,000, compared with $167,000 for Hispanics and $94,000 for Whites.6

But even accounting for institutional failures in early education, the legal profession needs to act differently now than it has in the past. Recognizing the socio-economic and achievement gaps is but the first step to erasing them; now, we must take concrete measures, such as targeted job ads, internship and mentoring programs, and articulated commitments to create a workforce that reflects the makeup of the surrounding community. All stakeholders must work to eliminate the socioeconomic isolation of racial minorities and, in the interim, work in conjunction with the minority community to demonstrate that the benefits of inclusive employment practices more than make up for the racial achievement gap.

Like so many of my peers, my career has not benefited from exposure to African American lawyers and clients. My hope for our daughter, who is of half-Sri Lankan and half-German descent, is that she live in a society that has successfully made the transition to inclusivity. More of us need to be intentional agents of change.

1 See ABA Profile of the Legal Profession (2021) at https://www.abalegalprofile.com/ demographics/ 2 https://www.nalp.org/1017research 3 https://www.nalp.org/uploads/2020_NALP_Diversity_Report.pdf 4 https://www.nalp.org/uploads/2020_NALP_Diversity_Report.pdf 5 A FederAl right to educAtion, p.9 (Kimberly Jenkins Robinson ed. 2019).. 6 https://www.legalevolution.org/2020/07/rocks-on-the-back-of-first-generationcollege-grads-attending-law-school-182/