Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Maybe the base doesn't care as much about "receiving" policy as it does about having someone in charge who will piss off coastal elites, put minorities and immigrants in their place, support law & order, give voice to traditional gender roles, and give a big "f*ck you" to other countries. (If Appalachians really wanted government health care programs, they would have voted for government health care programs.)

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

In so many ways, the moment we are living through is just peak frustration at how comfortable people are with denial and outright obfuscation. On race, on criminal justice, on climate change, on taxes. Heck, on what the president just said or didn't say.

NYC is a bit different - or seems that way when I've visited which used to be several times a year - but the sad thing is it doesn't really take any cultivation for most of America. We did our segregating generations ago and then locked it in place with suburbs, zoning and school choice. Just go about your day not actively trying to diversify your social group and voila, it's pretty much all white.

Worse, we've pretty much accepted that there's nothing wrong with that.

Or, actually, it's white with some Asian and latinx mixed in, around here maybe some native people, but virtually no black.

Doesn't need to be discussed, but worth thinking about.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I could not agree more. To be alive in America today is to be in a constant state of rage.

The thing is, we all are people in power. We hire people. We fire people. To the extent we work in firms that are overwhelmingly white and male, especially at the higher levels, it is officially our fault now.

We were going to all be better than this, but we're not, and now we've got to make some impact and change some of this shit before it's too late.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Bullshit. The process of retaining segregation takes enormous effort. Knocking minorities down at work, focusing on the good neighborhood, good family or good school the unqualified white boy went to in the hiring committee meeting, making someone moving in to the neighborhood feel a little uncomfortable , finding ways to not give a minority a loan or letting them into a school, keeping some recent immigrant from getting too comfortable attending the same churches, having police who stop anyone with dark skin from driving across the town line.... these are all efforts white people take constantly.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Blue Lives Matter, internet chapter.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Exactly.

And the real work comes in the constant self-reassurance that it isn't intentional.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I had dinner with my niece last week. She told me she was recruited by Stanford (swimming) but chose to go to LSE partially because she didn't want to put up with all the crap of being black in America. She did not feel like that a few years ago when she talked about wanting to go to school here. This is just anecdotal but I do feel like our profile has taken a nosedive internationally and I am ashamed.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

When we started my firm (and you all know me I just realized so this shit is QT), we were tiny. And we needed a 401k company, and hardly any wanted someplace so small. We had two candidates.

One was a black college friend. At school we were close, I moved away and was gone for a while, so a bit of drift. Still, our young families got together 3 or 4 times a year. He will (I will?) attend a funeral.

Great sales pitch, who knows what competence means in that field, but he sounded good.

The other group was white people who sounded like computer programs.

I brought him in and my wonk partner brought the white guys in. See, i was clients and he was wonking structure. So he was the one who did the deep dive into what makes sense here. He was making dozens of decisions each week at first, and I simply did not disagree, as to do so would require me getting up to speed.

And he told me that he wanted to go with the white guys. I asked why. They were cheaper in some respect (I later asked my friend who said that is all a shell game). I thought about saying, "fuck that, it's my work bringing in the $$, why did you even bring in someone else." But. I. Didn't. Instead I called my friend and told him. And he really didn't care (I'm sure he was pissed at the insult, but substantively) because we were small. But right now we'd be a good account. Sill, he is doing fine. We would be a good smallish account, at best.

We stayed friends (until divorce, so I see him now less frequently).


I later came to realize the reasons probably had a lot to do with perceived
competence, I can only assume because of race. My partner has never done anything else that looked like that. And 4 years ago, the two of us, together we fired a partner because of racist shit on his FB. But you guys are right, everyone deals with the outward racism, but it is the "who gets the 401K work" that is this year's challenge.

As to hiring, that is a tough one in patents. The realities are such that we do not see black engineers going to law school in large enough numbers. My former biggest client had a black gc, he was big on hiring POC. The assistant patent position opened up and he insisted it be filled with a black attorney. A year later they had not filled it and he hired a Greek guy. There are upstream problems. Plus, at least around here, diversity drives from auto companies are such that black engineers get good job offers, so why go to ls?

And I was grooming one of my basketball guys to get into patent. But he just went to Australia to play pro ball (happy for him, but I did try).


EDIT- I didn't say it, but i feel like a complete shit about the 401k stuff, completely no excuse, shit.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Wow.

If the Dems don't win either the House or the Senate in 2018, I think this country (as we know it) is over.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I know what LSE is, of course, but you might clarify for these others who are more provincial.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

A nosedive seems like a generous characterization of our international reputation. This summer, we had to convince my wife's relatives in Greece that many Americans actually are aware that Trump is a pathological liar and and emotionally unstable disaster. They thought our entire country had just completely gone off the deep end. And let's face it, we basically have. Sebastian can scour the internet for the rest of time finding commentators who will say the Trump is not "the problem," that he is just a symptom of problems that have been bubbling up for decades. Fuck that shit. Trump is "the problem" "right fucking now." And, unfortunately, because his level of complete unhinged sociopathic fuckery is fucking horrible and dangerous RIGHT NOW, we don't have time to sit back and worry about figuring out exactly why Trump being elected was not Sebastian's fault. We need to try to contain the hemorrhaging occurring right now in this fuckhole of a country.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I don't know what it is, but I know it comes right after LSD.

Here's Parliament with "Funkentelechy" for the Daily Dose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFalZJ5eEwY

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

We all have sins, which is not to excuse them, just to say we have to work harder to make up for them. The thing is, I'd bet your guy was better in every way - he probably had to be.

I just lost a really star black associate, a guy who will have a great practice and will go far, to one of the big national shops in town, and fundamentally I think I just didn't protect him enough from the little shitty things in a way that would have made us different. He would have loved to have been at a smaller shop that was different. Building a welcoming place is hard. Of course, the huge increase in pay probably helped too. But there have to be consequences for the white folks who make life miserable through a lot of little things. We have to call more of them out.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

ehh, worst is that this isn’t really true. Worst is that they are all tied for even, at least as far as we can see.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Usually it goes the other way. Black associates at large firms find themselves on the outside of the power pipeline (and the related social dynamic) and move (i) in-house, which (although not exactly where it should be) is light years ahead of law firms when it comes to diversity, especially big ones or (ii) to smaller firms with better records with diversity even though the paychecks are smaller.

What I don't understand is why firms don't raid law school night school programs. The people there are often diverse, have worked all their lives (including through school--and the class load is like 1 fewer per semester while the curriculum and professors are exactly the same), and would be completely loyal to any law firm that brought them in.

I had the opportunity to talk to Disney's GC about what I thought would be an innovative way to bring in more diversity to his outside counsel and mentioned this. Of course he said he was the product of a night school law school education and seemed like he thought it to be a good idea. I don't understand the stigma attached to it. But it's there. Can any of you who worked at a large firm (hell, or any firm) name one person who came from night school? This idea that the best talent comes from the most elite schools is a joke. Our firm's partnership adheres to this delusion and there are very few partners who went to elite schools! There is a real disconnect about how people process themselves versus everyone else.

TM