In the early 1990s, the Cleveland Browns were losing most of their football games. Everyone wanted to fire the miserable head coach — a loser named Bill Belichick. As I drove home from work, I’d occasionally tune into the local sports talk station, where the host, Bill Needle, would discuss with callers the Indians’ starting rotation, the Cavaliers’ line-up (a decade before LeBron), and the Browns’ woes.
My son, Jeremy — you remember him — was in kindergarten at the time. The school scheduled a meeting of the teacher and all of the kids’ parents. I worked at the largest law firm in Cleveland (and the second- or third-largest firm in the world at the time), and I drove straight from the office, wearing my business suit, to the parent-teacher conference.
One of the other parents at the meeting introduced himself as Bill Needle. At the end of the meeting, I asked that person if it was a coincidence of names or if he was the guy I sometimes listened to on the radio at night. He looked me up and down, not missing the relatively formal attire, and said, “You don’t look like a four hours of ‘Belichick sucks’ kind of guy to me.’”
Bill and I became pretty good friends, and he later told me that he often talked about race on the air. He said that many people were afraid of the topic or couldn’t handle it sensitively. But sports teams were diverse, there were issues about race in the leagues, and he was glad to be one of the relatively few people who could talk about the subject without enraging listeners.
I flashed back to that moment last week, when I was on a Zoom call with a bunch of old law school buddies. (This pandemic has been good for at least one thing: I’ve reconnected by Zoom with folks who I spoke to only sporadically over the past few decades.) Three of the old buddies are now law school professors, and the gang on the call talks openly about all subjects, as you would expect old friends to do — politics, religion, race, sexual orientation, whatever. No subject is off limits. As one of us said recently, “When we get together on these calls, the rule is this: ‘Offense is often given, but never taken.’”
When the subject of race came up recently, most of the folks on the call, and all three academics, said that they would be very reluctant to speak publicly about matters of race. The general agreement was that there are evolving rules on this topic that folks can’t anticipate or don’t yet understand. Unless you’re a specialist in the vocabulary, and you know where all the land mines are hidden, there’s no reason to take the chance of talking about race in public.
I personally am pretty darned foolish, but I’m not foolish enough to ignore the advice of all my old buddies. I’m not saying a thing here about race.
But I am noting that there are significant issues about race affecting our world, and we’re probably less likely to resolve those issues successfully if people are afraid even to discuss them.
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.