Obama and the ‘Invisible Man’

Before Barack Obama became the first African-American to become his party’s nominee for president, he had achieved another milestone: being elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.Senator Obama’s tenure of the latter earned him a reputation of equanimity and fairness. “Obama Kept Law Review Balanced,” Politico.com headlined its June study of his time as head of the law review. Escaping notice so far has been a Note, roughly 18-page papers on an area of law penned by third-year students, that cuts close to home for the barrier-breaking candidate.In Harvard Law Review’s January 1991 issue, it published an authorless piece titled “Invisible Man: Black and Male Under Title VII.” The Harvard Law Review’s Web site explains its policy to not identify the authors of Notes on the grounds “that many members of the Review, besides the author, make a contribution to each published piece.”The piece argued in favor of allowing black men to sue under federal civil rights legislation for discrimination based on both their race and gender. “Recent scholarship and jurisprudence have given welcome attention to the particular experience of black women in the workplace and have proposed remedies to address their specific concerns,” the Note read. “The legal system has failed to provide parallel protection against the special features of discrimination against black men.”Unlike the prevailing thought on sex discrimination, where men, regardless of race, have a favored position as compared to women, the author contended that for the purpose of employment discrimination lawsuits, the gender of black men should give them more protection under the law: “Black men do not benefit in employment from privilege by gender; rather, they are totally separated from white men when blackness, a traditionally disenfranchised category, is combined with maleness, normally considered a privileged one.”The discussion of both race and gender holds significance after a primary campaign where it is widely believed that Mr. Obama’s black male status trumped Hillary Clinton’s position as a white woman.Comments specific to the plight of the black male have been part of Mr. Obama’s campaign. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama has brought a message of responsibility to black men. Speaking to a black church group in Chicago in June, Mr. Obama said, “too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes.”Seventeen years earlier, when Mr. Obama was the president of Harvard Law Review, the January 1991 Note included statements such as “black men are disproportionately unemployed in most fields” and “educational disadvantage is an inadequate explanation for those occupational distributions and the corresponding unemployment rates.”While calling for additional legal protections for black men, the Note addressed other issues that wounded the demographic group: “Serious social factors not directly attributable to discrimination work to remove black men from the realm of employability … These include incarceration and early death.”The January 1991 Note also addressed a controversial issue in race relations — then and now — cultural differences between the races. “Differences in cultural styles often lead employers to conclude that black men have attitudes and personal characteristics that conflict with a predominately white social atmosphere,” the Note stated. “Many black men — although certainly not all — are more verbally direct, expressive, and assertive than white men.” To state such today would likely get a candidate for higher office in trouble.Citing cases where black men had their employment discrimination suits blocked because employers could show the hiring of African-Americans, i.e., black women, the piece hinted that the black community could split off into two distinct communities of males and females. “The growing disparity between the status of black men and women creates a distrust that threatens to divide a community of people with a remarkable historical ability to act collectively in redressing the wrongs perpetrated against them,” the Note concluded.While the president did get a near final “president’s read” to be able to review the issue as it neared completion, it’s unclear how much direct involvement with the piece Mr. Obama would have had. It was typical practice in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for the president of the Harvard Law Review to give autonomy to the individual section editors, in this case, the editor of the Notes.But the “Invisible Man” Note does offer a glimpse into the work produced by the institution Mr. Obama headed. When elected to the Law Review’s presidency back in 1990, he told the New York Times “it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks.” That contrast makes the 1991 Note worth looking at and thinking about as we watch Mr. Obama navigate his relationship with the African-American community and vie for the nation’s top job.Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

Obama and the ‘Invisible Man’

Obama and the ‘Invisible Man’

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