(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
Three things:
Thing one: Lawyers were arrested in New York last week for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police patrol car. If you had any sense, you’d be asking, “Why do they call those things ‘Molotov cocktails’?”
Good news: You’ve come to the right place.
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs at the start of World War II. Molotov and the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact — the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — on August 23, 1939, which permitted World War II to start with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. A couple of months later, the Soviets invaded Finland. The Soviets insisted that they weren’t bombing Finland, but rather were distributing humanitarian food parcels to help their starving neighbors. The Finns dubbed the bombs “Molotov bread baskets” and created a drink to accompany the food parcels: “Molotov cocktails.”
Thing two: Joe Alioto was the mayor of San Francisco from 1968 to 1976. I tried a case with Joe in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1992. We were sitting in a hotel room in St. Paul when the Rodney King verdict was announced and the riots started.
Alioto rarely mentioned his time as mayor. Watching the rioting on television, he shook his head and started talking wistfully: “Damn fools. When Martin Luther King was shot in 1968, every mayor in America was saying, ‘Stay calm. Don’t riot.’ So there were riots all across America. I got into a police car, stuck my head up through the sun roof, and shouted through a megaphone, ‘The murderers can’t win! Come to City Hall tomorrow at noon and protest with me!’ We had no riots and a huge protest the next day. When will they ever learn?”
I flashed back to that moment with the death of George Floyd. Most public officials said, “Stay calm. Don’t riot.” So they got riots. Only a very few said, “This is an outrage! Come protest with me!”
As Joe Alioto (may he rest in peace) said some 30 years ago: Damn fools. When will they ever learn?
Thing three: Corporations around the world are telling managers to reach out to people of color and offer the support that’s appropriate in times like this. I, at least, find that working from home makes that a more difficult task. Chatting with people by the water cooler is easy; any topic can come up. But affirmatively raising sensitive issues by telephone or Zoom is far more difficult. In group settings — a meeting of everyone in a small department, for example — one can say during a Zoom call that the Magnificent Mile was filled with shattered glass on Tuesday and boarded up like a war zone on Wednesday; what’s happening near you? That could start an appropriate conversation about how we can’t let the message of racial injustice be lost in the aftermath of looting. But it’s harder in individual calls.
Working from home has many advantages, but it doesn’t encourage meaningful discussions with co-workers.
Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.