Diary of a Socio-cultural Misfit

By Majessire L. Smith, Esq.

If you've read any of my previous articles you probably know that I am a young, black woman with dreadlocks and a practicing attorney at a firm. If you give that some thought for just a second, you'll realize that I live in two separate but adjoining worlds, neither of which is particularly welcoming to members of the other.

Many of the people I consider my social and cultural peers do not necessarily care for attorneys. I'm sure you realize that the phrase, "do not care for" is a polite euphemism in this context. In my community, attorneys, police officers, social workers, and essentially any civil servants with the apparent power to incarcerate are viewed with a degree of distrust varying only slightly from person to person. Needless to say, my career choice does not make me exceedingly popular among these individuals.

I should clarify that these individuals are my peers in only the most liberal sense. I am speaking of the socio-cultural community to which I belong, but I am not speaking of my close friends and family. When told of my decision to become a lawyer years ago, my loved ones celebrated my decision and spoke words of encouragement. My mother emitted a high-pitched, near-deafening squeal of excitement, surprisingly restrained for her. My brother gave me a smile and an affirming nod. He was proud. They sent care packages while I studied for the bar exam. They expressed confidence that I would do well, and expressed no surprise when I did. They are, of course, the only ones whose collective opinion truly matters.

However, for the purposes of the topic at hand, it is the views of the rest of my "peers" that I will discuss at length. The bottom line is people do not like attorneys, especially not my people. But for my people, it goes far beyond the universally accepted, cross-cultural view that attorneys are dishonest and greedy. They equate attorneys with the law, the establishment, Babylon, the Man. When told of my career, they assume that I work for a government that removes black children from their homes, or that I support a system that imprisons black and Hispanic young men in droves. Some even use my conscious decision to voluntarily enter what is obviously and statistically a white man's world as a basis on which to question my "blackness."

I must admit, there was a time when I found this vexing to a profound extent. After all, it was my blackness that motivated me to join the legal community in the first place. This is a world in which very little blackness exists, certainly not enough. Nowadays, it does not vex me nearly as much. Perhaps time has sort of thickened my skin and dulled my angst. Besides, my experiences in the other of the two worlds I inhabit are much more troublesome.

As you can imagine, there are very few black attorneys practicing law at the average law firm. Of the black attorneys even fewer are women, and fewer still have dreadlocks. This was equally true of most of my law school classes. It was also true of the large sprawling lecture hall in which I took the bar exam. There are simply not very many of us in this profession. And the assumptions and preconceived notions that follow us as young black men and women can be a death sentence to a young attorney's career, even if those notions are not overtly held.

I myself have noticed the manifestations of these notions, subtle as they are, in several positions I have held as a student and as practicing attorney over the years. I'd like to share a few of these with the readers as general observations. There have been times when a young black attorney's work may have been scrutinized more closely and judged more harshly than that of some of her colleagues. A mistake overlooked and forgiven as a fluke in another attorney might be viewed as evidence confirming the ineptitude already suspected in an attorney of color. Our abilities often appear to have been assessed at a lower level, which manifests itself in terms of the assignments we are given. Every once in a while a young black attorney is mistaken for the mail clerk, in an office in which the attorneys wear suits and the mail clerks most notably do not. This requires us to work twice as hard for half of the respect that our counterparts get as of right; and we do.

My racial identity is questioned by my socio-cultural peers because of my career choice, and my ability to practice law is questioned by my professional peers because of my racial identity. This makes a young black attorney practicing at a law firm the ultimate socio-cultural misfit. I must admit, this is one of a handful of things I did not anticipate when choosing a career in the practice of law. But young attorneys are a notoriously ambitious and driven bunch. Perhaps we will all succeed, not in spite of it, but because of it.

(Majessire L. Smith, Esq. is a contributor to Island Vibes Magazine. For comments, please feel free to contact her at majessire@islandvibesmag.com.)