Narrative Excerpt from Lani Guinier, Of Gentlemen and Role Models, 6 Berkeley Women’s L. J. 93 (1990). For a full version of the article from which this is drawn, visit this site.

In 1984 I returned to Yale Law School to participate on a panel of mainly black alumni reminiscing about the thirty years since Brown v. Board of Education. It was a symposium sponsored by the current black students who were eager to hear the voices of those who came before them. Each of us spoke for ten minutes in a room adorned by the traditional portraits of larger-than-life white men. It was the same classroom in which, ten years earlier, I had sat for “Business Units” (corporations) with a white male professor who addressed all of us, male and female, as gentlemen. Every morning, at ten minutes after the hour, he would enter the classroom and greet the upturned faces: “Good morning gentlemen.” He explained this ritual the first day. He had been teaching for many years; he was a creature of habit. He readily acknowledged the presence of the few “ladies” by then in attendance, but admonished those of us born into that other gender not to feel excluded by his greeting. We, too, in his mind, were simply gentlemen.

In his view, gentlemen was an asexual term, one reserved for reference to those who shared a certain civilized view of the world and who exhibited a similarly civilized demeanor. If we were not already, law school would certainly teach us how to be gentlemen. Gentlemen of the bar maintain distance from their clients, are capable of arguing both sides of any issue, and, while situated in a white male perspective, are ignorant to differences of culture, gender and race. That lesson was at the heart of becoming a professional. By his lights, the greeting was a form of honorific. It evoked the traditional values of legal education to train detached, neutral problem-solvers. It anticipated the perception, if not the reality, of all of us becoming gentlemen.

It took many intervening years for me to gain the confidence to question directly this term that symbolically stripped me of my race, my gender and my voice. Now, seated at the podium in the familiar classroom preparing to address a race- and gender-mixed audience, I felt the weight of the presence of those stern, larger-than-life gentlemen portraits. For me, this was still not a safe place.

Yet, all the men on the panel reminded us how they felt to return “home,” with fondly revealed stories about their three years in law school. Anecdotes about their time as law students, mostly funny and a touch self-congratulatory, abounded. The three black men may not have felt safe either, but they each introduced their talks with brief yet loving recollections of their law school experiences. Even the so-called “black radical” among us waxed nostalgic and personal with proud detail about his encounters as the law school troublemaker.

It was my turn. No empowering memories stirred my voice. I had no personal anecdotes for the profound senses of alienation and isolation caught in my throat every time I opened my mouth. Nothing resonated there in that room for a black woman, even after my ten years as an impassioned civil rights attorney. Instead I promptly began my formal remarks, trying as hard as I could to find my voice in a room in which those portraits spoke louder than I ever could. I spoke slowly and carefully, never once admitting, except by my presence on the podium, that I had ever been a student at that school or in that room before. I summoned as much authority as I could to be heard over the sounds of silence erupting from those giant images of gentlemen hanging on the wall, and from my own ever-present memory of slowly disappearing each morning and becoming a gentleman of Business Units I.

Immediately after my presentation, the other black woman on the panel rose to speak. She too did not introduce herself with personal experiences or warm reminiscences about her past association with the law school, but, like me, remained upright and dignified. Afterwards, she and I huddled together to talk about how different the law school we had experienced was from the one recollected by our male colleagues. We were the disappeareds, she and I. The alienation stirred by our return to the place where we first became gentlemen was too profound and silencing to share except between ourselves. Continuously scrutinized by those larger-than-life portraits, our humanity, culture, frames of reference, and identity as women of color were dislocated by those giant-size gentlemen images, which evoked memories of our law school experience. We were the minority within a minority whose existence, even physical presence, had been swallowed up within “neutral” terms and other marginalizing traditions associated with educating gentlemen. Except at private intersections of blackness and womanhood, our voices had been silenced.

Four years later, at the first Women of Color and the Law Conference, I again returned to Yale Law School. I was invited to speak at a panel entitled “Roots in our Communities: What Roles for Lawyers and Professionals?” This time I was invited by young female students of color who asked me to speak explicitly about the personal choices and conflicts I had experienced in my career as a black female civil rights attorney. At the conference, I tried to overcome my training as a surrogate gentleman who distances her personal self from her professional self. I also tried to overcome the self-protective silence that earlier helped me survive as a gentleman in Business Units I. This time I found my voice. I revealed myself in context, talking about my family, my colleagues, my adversaries and my clients. In all my professional roles, I experienced what Mari Matsuda calls “multiple consciousness,” meaning the bifurcated thinking that allows one to shift back and forth between one’s personal consciousness, and the white male perspective that dominates the legal profession.

Multiple consciousness allows us to operate within mainstream discourse and “within the details of our own special knowledge,” producing both madness and genius. Multiple consciousness provides intellectual camouflage and emotional support for the outsider who always feels the threeness of race, gender and marginality. It engenders the spirit of W.E.B. Dubois’ idea of double-consciousness, two warring selves within one black body, living within “the veil” yet gifted with “second-sight.” Even while performing insider roles, many of us still function as outsiders. As a black woman civil rights attorney with insider privileges and outsider consciousness, I moved along the perimeter of cultural norms (roots, community, race and gender) and cultivated status (mainstream professional role) as an explorer and translator of these different identities.

For outsiders, who do not experience the world through colorblindness or gender neutrality, multiple consciousness is a cultural norm. Those with outsider consciousness live with the peculiar sensation of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. We are outsiders precisely because of, not in spite of, our race and gender. In our insider roles, we are still outsiders. As a result, we experience colorblindness, gender neutrality, and individual perspective as unfamiliar, mainstream, existential luxuries. “Neutrality” feels very different from the perspective of an outsider. A race-neutral, gender-neutered perspective is apparently enjoyed, to the extent it exists at all, by gentlemen: those with a white, male perspective, those in the majority, and those gentlemen surrogates to whom the majority grants insider privileges. For self-conscious, second-sighted outsiders, multiple consciousness centers marginality and names reality.

A Note on How This Changes Minds

I first read Lani Guinier’s work as a freshman in college in a terrific course taught by Professor Luis Fraga titled Voting Rights in the United States. Her book, Tyranny of the Majority : Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy, helped to shift the course of my life by convincing me to pursue a career in law. Later on, in law school, when three fellow classmates and I were dissatisfied with the lack of courses on Critical Race Theory at Yale Law School, we turned to Lani Guinier’s work as one of our guides as we marched through a student-led reading group on Critical Race Theory. Her essay, Of Gentlemen and Role Models, inspired us as first-year law students to assert ourselves in class, and to push back against accounts of law that erased our own narratives and experiences.

It was no surprise then that I would turn to Professor Guinier’s work again when creating the syllabus for my very first Critical Race Theory course as a law professor, which I taught in Fall 2018 at the UConn School of Law. I used Professor Guinier’s essay in my class on voice, narrative, and experiential epistemology. Guinier’s essay is not only a model example of the use of narrative in CRT methodology, but it is also an essay that has inspired (and empowered) so many of my students.

The lesson that legal education, legal practice, and law itself adopt the perspective of dominant culture or “gentleman”—white, cishet, wealthy, male—is an important one for new law students. The experience of law school is often alienating for students who do not realize that law school is as much about learning legal rules as it is about becoming socialized into a profession—a profession that still does not reflect the diversity of communities across the United States. This aspect of legal education can be stifling as students often feel like their voice, ways of knowing, and experiences have no value within the law school classroom. Some might feel like they lack the language to accurately describe how they experience the law school classroom, legal education, and their socialization into the legal professional more generally.

Guinier’s words provide a powerful antidote to these sentiments of exclusion and an instruction to reveal ourselves “in context.” I take this to mean that students should have the space to share their stories, their backgrounds, and their realities and bring those perspectives into the classroom. Professors have a central role to play in creating the conditions for students to learn while showing up as their authentic selves. This task is even more important only months after the Supreme Court’s decision ending race-conscious affirmative action in higher education. We have no sense yet what the impact of such a momentous shift in higher education policy will be, but by many fair-minded predictions, racial and ethnic diversity will decline. For professors interested in ensuring that the legal profession remains open and inclusive for students who do make it to law school, resisting practices that seek to transform all students into “gentlemen” will be essential. (Jamelia Morgan, 08/09/23)