I recently received a call from a friend's daughter, fresh out of college, eager to start her career, looking for business contacts. This is a call I enjoy: After 30 years the practice of law, I have a lot of colleagues in business — real estate, insurance, medicine — and I can often send a few emails leading a young person to a phone interview or coffee, a secondary connection, and occasionally an interview, which will land a smart and talented kid a coveted first job.
But after the recent uprisings in Baltimore, this year's call left me unsettled because of white privilege: the socioeconomic advantages enjoyed by white people simply by virtue of being white. Established by slavery, and later reinforced by de jure segregation and de facto segregation, the scope of white privilege is immense. It spans from the color of Band-aids to the likelihood that you'll get pulled over for a minor traffic infraction and the assumptions you're met with by interviewers, co-workers and clients. This is not something white people talk about at dinner; at best, it's a section of diversity class that we are required to attend or something we read about but never really discuss. Frankly, it makes everyone uncomfortable.
I have swum in the luxuriant pool of white privilege my entire life: I am the son of a successful builder who made his career in Howard County. At the time he was getting loans and permits to develop neighborhoods in the mid '60s and early '70s, there was still de facto segregation there; I know, my father regularly took me to a restaurant on Frederick Road where there were separate entrances for whites and blacks, separate bars and separate bathrooms. African-Americans lived in limited areas of Ellicott City, and you saw only a very few African-Americans in the stores, neighborhoods or the touted public schools until Columbia was built in the middle '70s.
As a young lawyer, one of my very first cases was in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, and the presiding judge was an old friend of my father's from their Baltimore neighborhood, Hunting Ridge. My early nervousness was assuaged by the judge's friendly greeting: He knew my father from their childhood and made it a point to say so. I was relieved; I didn't think that the judge's greeting would affect the outcome of the case, but I was reassured by the fact that I had a connection and was going to get a fair hearing. Put in context, this was a double dose of white privilege: I was able to practice law because of my father's success at a time when an African American man of similar talent and ability could not have succeeded because of de facto segregation. And the judge knew my father through a relationship developed in a neighborhood that had a restrictive covenant, prohibiting the sale of homes to African-Americans.
I don't feel guilty about any this; I didn't invent white privilege, nor could I have done anything to prevent its influence on my upbringing. It is only that in the light of middle age that I can see its indelible effect on me, causing me to look at my life and my world quite differently.
I have dinner with a group of African-American and Latino high school students two or three times a month, all products of Baltimore's more difficult neighborhoods. I volunteer for a group that educates and mentors them, and I enjoy our meals and conversation. This time has allowed me to give them a bit of a window into my world and my work as a business lawyer, and, I hope, some encouragement and vision for better things for their own lives.
Most of these young men will be the first in their families to attend college, and with that, the first in their families to enter professions where they will have no networks — no history of family, friends and parents' friends to support their nascent careers. These are bight, hard-working young men; I have little doubt that they will do well and complete their educations. My fear is that once they leave college, they will be absent the human and social engine that kickstarts so many careers, as it did mine.
If Baltimore is to get past the anger and frustration that led to the riots of this of this spring, it will take the concerted effort of everyone in the legal, banking, insurance, medical and business professions to reach out past our extant networks of friends to the young men and women struggling to get out of the endless cycle of ignorance, poverty and violence that envelops the east and west side of Baltimore City. We must do this in order to find candidates who are different from us but far more in need of our assistance. Private affirmative action? I don't think so, just a stab at the persistent ghost of white privilege.
Stephen B. Awalt is an attorney in Towson. His email is sba@kdattorneys.com.