I need to get this off my chest before I can get on to all my other work


Understanding The Enemy - My Law School Clinic

a.k.a. the banality of racism


General Observations

This clinic represents what I'll call the banality of racism. Of course, like all evil, it appears banal to some and shocking to others. I've written extensively about racism at my clinic in a letter which some readers of this blog already have. These observations are somewhat different.

For one thing, there is a culture at this clinic (and at other clinics and institutions serving low-income people of color) which promotes and encourages exaggeration of clients' "faults." The students and some of the professors in this clinic should get oscars for how dramatic and exasperated they get from even the most minor things our clients do or say (At the same time, the bourgeois white people at our school do the craziest shit and no one bats an eye, including assaulting people in bars and urinating on janitors). Frankly, they should not be defending people if they have such a hard time dealing with it. On the other hand, much of this posturing is really about getting attention and inflating their own ego in a weird twisted way.

There is an "objectivity" that is promoted and encouraged at the clinic. One way this is promoted is the policy that you are not guaranteed the clinic of your choice (i.e. you can be put into the prosecutor program even though you request the defense program). Also, there are lots of defense-oriented students who do the prosecutor program and vice versa so they can "try it out." The prosecutors in the defense clinic are the ones that most worry me- I've had a few exchanges with one where he justifies/explains a result that seems very bad. This "objectivity" presents cases as academic exercises rather than crossroads in human lives.

Racism and classism underpin and enable these and other practices/phenomena at the clinic. Racism and classism make it easier for the participants of the clinic to not see our clients as multi-dimensional, full human beings and equals. More importantly, racism and classism make it easier for participants to not care about the clients. In fact, the framework of objectivity and its attendant official policies assume that we don't care about our clients. Despite liberal lip service paid towards that effect, more often than not, such lip service does not reflect that they actually feel what they are saying, including and especially when it's a supervising professor who's speaking. This attitude of not really caring allows for a caricaturization of clients and emphasis on their faults, and at the same time, allows clinic participants to shower praise on themselves for putting up with the clients.

One thing that has consistently shocked me is how students in the clinic, many of whom have relatively little life experience, believe they know what's best for a client (who is always from a radically different background). And I'm not just talking about prosecutors (who are obviously fucked up in this respect) but defense-minded people. This kind of megalomania is only possible because they do not see clients as equals, and fits with the pattern of portraying clients as stupid, incapable, etc. And again, the way this megalomania is expressed sometimes appears to be benevolent, but it is really about self-aggrandizement, not empathy. The undertone is often one of dehumanization and disrespect built on racism and classism.

Finally, this culture of banal racism and classism can be seen in the lighthearted way that participants discuss serious cases and issues. In many instances (as I've written about before), participants have smirked when I bring up racism in the criminal system. In one instance, during a very heavy and heated discussion about drug addiction, two individuals (from the defense program) laughed out loud, then explained that they were not laughing about our discussion but about something else, as if that didn't still reveal something about their attitude. One of these individuals also once said that a client yelled at him because the client believed he was making fun of the client. Frankly, I don't think the client was imagining things- people can sense when others disrespect them.

I should say that the participants in my clinic are not bad people, but they are participants in a system of white supremacy and capitalism. They are consciously and unconsciously conditioned to dehumanize the people they are supposed to serve: defendants who are all very marginalized, almost all people of color (almost all black), and all poor. As far as time and effort they invest, it is a range. Of course, there are supervisors to make sure they don't screw up, but there is a huge amount you can get away with without the supervisor realizing you're cutting corners - and one feature of the clinic and with lawyers servicing oppressed people (and perhaps other service providers) is that you always take the side of your colleague. The student attorneys themselves range from those who are right wing to those who really care. Those who care the most and who are anti-racist etc. must decide whether and how to challenge the clinic. But most of those who actually do care about clients just try to do a good job, while being complicit and/or unaware of the problems with the clinic as a whole, not to mention committing many of the problematic actions I've outlined.

It is ultimately the supervisors/professors who are most responsible for these problems. There is one in particular that I dislike the most (the one I wrote that long letter to which I shared with some of you), but I dislike three out of the four. There is a fifth one that I've had almost no interaction with. But although the supervisors set the tone, they are only unleashing a pre-existing sentiment. The students, after all, only pick up on certain practices and postures from certain professors.

One note I want to make in comparing my experience at the BU clinic with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and the Office of the Public Defender in San Francisco. To put it bluntly, NDS is the opposite of the BU clinic. Everyone there cares about their clients in a way that is much more real. The PD office in SF is not quite as militant, but like NDS, identifies with defendants in ways that are absent in my law school clinic.

As far as the application of this analysis to social services work in general outside of educational institutions: we have to take the problem of inadequate service seriously. Real lives are affected. On the one hand, we need more resources to service people in oppressed communities, but we must also make sure to hire and promote those who actually care, and not those who just see it as an alternate to corporate jobs with better hours, or the only option available to them because they can't find corporate work. While we build movements to fundamentally change these oppressive systems and attack the roots of these problems, more resources would allow service providers, in the mean time, to not have to prioritize some people in need of service over others.