Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [55]
Later in the seminar, we read Paul Barrett’s The Good Black. It breaks our hearts. Barrett, who is white, is a journalist for The Wall Street Journal. His subject is his African-American law school roommate, Lawrence Mungin. The book describes how Mungin sought all his life to be the “good black,” or the black who covered his race. Growing up in poverty in Queens, Mungin was told by his biracial mother: “You are a human being first,… an American second, a black third.” She favored Martin Luther King Jr. over Malcolm X, punished Mungin for talking “street talk,” and told him to “get past” his race. Mungin strove to do so—blazing through high school, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School with a relentless covering strategy. He laughed along with racially laden comments, avoided African-American groups and the “soul tables” in the dining halls, and never spoke of his experiences with racism. When he arrived at law school, a delegation of the Black Law Students’ Association visited Mungin to ask why he hadn’t joined and why he was rooming with a white law student. Mungin answered that he was there to get a credential, not to become an activist.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Mungin worked at three law firms before landing at Katten Muchin & Zavis. At Katten Muchin, Mungin continued to cover along all four axes. With respect to appearance, Barrett’s book makes repeated reference to Mungin’s sartorial style—he is described as the best-dressed man at the firm. While this might make Mungin seem a fop, Barrett shows that Mungin’s attire directly affected perceptions of his race in the middle-class white circles in which he lived and worked. When wearing a suit, Mungin received friendly nods from his neighbors in the suburbs of Alexandria, Virginia. When dressed for the gym, he saw the same neighbors tense up and clutch their purses. Mungin also engaged in affiliation-based covering, stressing his double Harvard pedigree because it sent “another reassuring signal to whites,” and speaking with a precision that led him to be described as “very articulate.” He avoided anything that might smack of activism, responding to perceived racial slights with exceeding mildness. He also eschewed contact with other African-Americans in the firm and in the broader legal community. As Mungin stated his own credo: “I wanted to show that I was like white people: ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m one of the good blacks.’ ”
Mungin’s relentless covering strategy, however, did not succeed. Isolated in the branch office in which he had chosen to work, Mungin gradually realized he had no chance of making partner. Believing his predicament to be a product of race discrimination, he sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal law that prohibits race-based employment discrimination. A mostly black jury awarded him $2.5 million, which a mostly white appellate panel reversed as unreasonable.
The tragedy of Mungin’s story is not that he lost his lawsuit. After reading Barrett’s book and the public documents in the case, I do not think Katten Muchin discriminated against him on the basis of race, by imposing covering demands or otherwise. The tragedy is that Katten Muchin had no occasion to make such covering demands, as Mungin came to the firm covering so assiduously, negating every possible stereotype about African-Americans in his behavior. That negation, of course, was no simple escape from his racial identity. In so carefully reversing every term of the racial stereotype, Mungin