“But you don’t look like a law professor!”

At times I too participate in the aesthetic deception, avoiding disclosure of my employment from others.  Discovery of my interest in family law and estates has triggered one too many unsolicited “story hours” about someone’s friend’s uncle’s girlfriend’s father in Terre Haute.  It is then when I am thankful that I look like I belong more in a band than on a panel. 

Is this a function of age?  (I am thirty-five.)  Of deportment? (I exercise regularly.)  Of hair? (I have locs, not a toupee.) Or is it a combination of these things, with the crowning influence of race?

I had a middle-aged woman at an airport flat out tell me that I was lying.  And yet another insisted that I was the “creative type.”  I suppose that writing and contemplation of legal problems counts as creativity. And numerous others have confessed that they never would have guess me to be a law professor. Frankly, I find it intensely annoying.

“Like a real professor? With tenure and all that?”

Track.  Tenure, that is.  This is where questioning gets sticky.  Even my own friends reserve the realm of law-professorship for people older (and presumably whiter) than myself.  People can believe that I could teach a class or two, attend a conference here and there, or even sit on a committee. Adjuncting is possible. But venturing into the realm of full-fledged academia is a stretch. 

Statistically, the population of black law professors is small. In 2006, 716 persons out of 8014 identified themselves as black to the American Association of Law Schools, an increase from 484 in 1992.  That’s an increase of approximately 16 people nationwide per year. These numbers indicate that diversification of law school faculties largely occurs from within the academy, rather than the recruitment of new professors from outside. 

But most, if not all professors of African descent have experienced racial profiling.  Eminent historian John Hope Franklin has been mistaken as a valet parking attendant.  A friend of mine was assumed to be a nanny for the fair-skinned child she was holding—her own.  And I myself have been assumed to be a mugger.

Of course, we can take these examples of misidentification with a grain of salt.  Perhaps Franklin stood by a podium at the front door of the hotel where people drop off their cars.  Or maybe I was walking down the street too close to the woman in front of me.  Or my friend was wearing a nanny’s smock.  These assumptions based on appearance could occur for a myriad of reasons when the seer possesses no acquaintance with the professor.  I would be amazed if the frightened woman on the street had turned around and said, “Oh, you scared me!  I thought you were going to mug me, but I feel safe now because you must be a Scholar!”  Probably not.

But for those situations where another person disbelieves the professions of the professor, the profiling takes on another color.  In this misappropriation of employment and identity, the disbelieved person faces a racial barrier that excludes her (and her kind) from a collective image of The Academy.  At the same time, it is a reminder of the minority scholar’s anomalous status.

These interactions are never confrontational.  They are most likely unintentional.  And most likely, the person “didn’t mean anything.”  Furthermore, they do not affect the scholar’s tenure or other types of job security.  Additionally, the interrogator might argue that they meant it as a compliment.  You don’t look like a law professor!

But why should a black law professor have to convince (however briefly) someone else of their gainful employment?  That fleeting moment of disbelief, however harmless, only demonstrates the persistent perception of the legal academy as the exclusive province of middle-aged white men.  For another person to incite a reaffirmation of my position requires me to adopt the Popeyesque psychology of “I am what I am.”  This is a rebuttable presumption black law professors, both men and women, should not have to face.

After an intense week of public reproval for making racist remarks.  1962 Nobel Prize winner, James D. Watson was suspended from his position as Chancellor and board member of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a censure for his remarks.  The 79 year old Nobel winning scientist resigned today in ignominy.

The NYT contains this story with the separate statements made by Cold Springs Harbor and Watson.  The NYT reports that: "He also referred to his Scots and Irish forebears, saying their lives were guided by faith in reason and social justice, 'especially the need for those on top to help care for the less fortunate.' ”

If you pair this book with The Derrick Bell Reader, edited by Richard and Jean from NYU Press in 2005, you will have insights into two of the most senior and most prolific voices in Critical Race Theory.

For a multidisciplinary anthology from an important new voice in critical theory, see Progressive Black Masculinities by State University of New York at Buffalo Law School associate professor Athena Mutua from Routledge Press.  The 15 selections include famous black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins and Beverly Guy-Sheftall along with well-known legal scholars such as Elizabeth Iglesias, John Calmore and Stefanie Phillips. The voices posit that the greatest peril to black men may be limited notions of manhood.

This latter reader is a great companion to UCLA professor Devon Carbado’s Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, published by NYU Press in 1999.

Dr. James Watson, who received the Nobel Prize, in 1962, for being the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has become embroiled in a nasty racial controversy because of remarks he made.  The British Broadcasting Network, BBC, reports that Watson told the London Sunday Times  that  "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".  He went on to say he hoped everyone was equal but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".

The British Science Museum has cancelled a speech that Watson was scheduled to deliver there on Friday, October, 19th.  The Museum spokesperson explained the cancellation by noting that "It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices...We know that eminent scientists can sometimes say things that cause controversy and the Science Museum does not shy away from debating controversial topics. However, we feel Dr Watson has gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are, as a result, cancelling his talk."

The scandalous, frequently fraudulent excesses of sub prime home mortgage lending are finally coming home to roost in the very coupes from which they originally escaped: money center banks and hedge fund portfolios. This is a market correction, the operation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. 

This administration believes in letting the invisible hand determine winners and losers.  Except when it doesn't.  For the moment, the Bush administration is unsure about letting unmodified market forces impose sanctions on major market players who made bad bets .  It fears that this will unsettle the entire economy.

In the financial world, nothing is truly private. Homeowners deserve straight talk and direct action on the racial impact of the current subprime crisis.  The evidence is mounting that black homeowners and latino homeowners, even those with high incomes have been disproportionately affected by the unregulated lending practices that started in minority communities and now threaten the entire economy.

If the problem has a racially disproportionate origin, the solution should include sensitive attention to the racial components of the proposed solution.

If the government had stepped in initially to protect borrowers when the problems were first spotted in minority communties,  the general crisis, that now threatens the interdependent world economy, might not have grown to its current dimension.  Creative government leadership is required.  Adam Smith and private solutions will not protect the nation from the full racial impact of the snowballing subprime mortgage crisis.

Recently, the Center for American Progress released a study that confirmed what many of us already knew: the nation’s radio airwaves are dominated by conservative talk. According to the study, 91% of the America’s news/talk radio programming is comprised of conservatives. As of Spring 2007, 2570 hours of conservative talk are offered per week in comparison to 254 hours of progressive talk. A separate analysis of the top ten radio markets revealed that 76% of the programming is conservative and only 24% is progressive. In response to this staggering imbalance, many people have called for a revival of the Fairness Doctrine, a federal policy that forced broadcasters to allow equal broadcasting time to opposing views.

Established in 1940, the Fairness Doctrine required government regulation in order to ensure that broadcast companies, of which there were only three, operated in the public interest by adequately informing citizens of important news. The doctrine, which had been in place since the establishment of the FCC, was vetoed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 when Congress attempted to mandate it. Soon after, Right-wing demagogue Rush Limbaugh began to syndicate his radio show in unprecedented fashion, leading the charge toward a conservative media revolution that has overdetermined American politics and left few progressive bodies standing.

Of course, pundits on the Right insist that this spike is due to the demands of the so-called Free Market. Observers like National Review’s Rich Lowry argue that conservative radio is ubiquitous simply because the American people want to hear Right-wing voices more than anyone else’s. Unfortunately, the numbers say otherwise: 56 percent of the American public and 53 percent of regular talk show listeners identify as liberal or moderate. Why wouldn’t they want radio options that reflect their political orientations?

Not coincidentally, the rise in conservative radio has been paralleled by an equally sharp drop in local ownership over the past twenty years. Since the 1980s, the number of large media companies has shrunk from over fifty to lesser than ten. At the same time, thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, locally owned networks have been swallowed up by companies like Clear Channel, which owns more than 1,200 radio stations around the country. This reorganization of ownership has rendered the market anything but free. In addition to cutting jobs and wages, the consolidation of media outlets has devoured small companies and eliminated ownership opportunities for women and people of color. Why does this matter? According to the Center for American Progress study, locally owned companies, as well as those owned by women and people of color, are considerably more likely to provide non-conservative programming.

Simply put, conservative radio dominates because American people don’t have a choice.

Although the Fairness Doctrine remains our best option for sustaining any semblance of media democracy, it is not without its limitations and shortcomings. By legislating our demands for equal time for the “other side,” we reify a liberal/conservative binary that effectively obscures the existence of perspectives that fall outside of that shortsighted dichotomy. Also, by intervening in the programming decisions of corporatized radio outlets, we fail to address the more profound structural problems that accompany neo-liberal globalization. Nevertheless, the Fairness Doctrine will provide us with a much-needed respite from the conservative media assault that has undermined democratic discourse and social justice.