Difference Blindness vs. Bias Awareness: Why Law Firms with the Best of Intentions Have Failed to Create Diverse Partnerships

This Article uses the example of BigLaw firms to explore the challenges that many elite organizations face in providing equal opportunity to their workers. Despite good intentions and the investment of significant resources, large law firms have been consistently unable to deliver diverse partnership structures - especially in more senior positions of power. Building on implicit and institutional bias scholarship and on successful approaches described in the organizational behavior literature, we argue that a significant barrier to systemic diversity at the law firm partnership level has been, paradoxically, the insistence on difference blindness standards that seek to evaluate each person on their individual merit. While powerful in dismantling intentional discrimination, these standards rely on an assumption that lawyers are, and have the power to act as, atomistic individuals - a dangerous assumption that has been disproven consistently by the literature establishing the continuing and powerful influence of implicit and institutional bias. Accordingly, difference blindness, which holds all lawyers accountable to seemingly neutral standards, disproportionately disadvantages diverse populations and normalizes the dominance of certain actors - here, white men - by creating the illusion that success or failure depends upon individual rather than structural constraints. In contrast, we argue that a bias awareness approach that encourages identity awareness and a relational framework is a more promising way to promote equality, equity, and inclusion.

Wrestling With Tradition: Japanese Activities at Amache, a World War II Incarceration Facility

I employ archaeological analyses, archival research, and oral histories to investigate traditional Japanese practices that were performed at Amache, a World War II Japanese American incarceration facility. I argue that these inter-generational practices helped to bridge a cultural gap that existed between several generations of Japanese Americans. For many incarcerated Japanese Americans, their first exposure to many traditional activities occurred during incarceration. The resulting social environment incorporated aspects of Japanese, Japanese American, and mainstream American influences, all of which were adapted to conditions during incarceration. Similarly, archaeological analyses allow for the investigation of traditional practice features. These provide evidence regarding the significance of the adapted landscape at Amache. Evidence of these practices suggests Amache internees had both a strong desire to maintain and celebrate these aspects of their Japanese heritage but they also incorporated non-traditional elements that reflected the unique living conditions during incarceration. Incarceration, I argue, created an environment in which a unique internee consciousness was formed in which the use of traditional practices was a focal point. The physical remains of traditional practices allow archaeologists to determine aspects of this newly formed consciousness that are not readily apparent in historical documentation.