LEGL 4500/6500 - Employment Law

Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, Esq.

Terry College of Business

Coming of age in the late 1960’s, Larry Mungin, 41, chose sides early on. He was, as Shelby Steele has described it, a bargainer: a black whose message to whites is, "I will confirm your racial innocence if you accept me." From the housing projects of Queens, N.Y., to Harvard law school, Mungin’s one goal was to become a partner in a prestigious firm. But at the Washington, D.C., office of Katten Muchin, his career derailed and he filed a multimillion-dollar racial-discrimination suit. Was the case vaild? Should we feel sorry for a lawyer who made six figures, but believed he deserved more? These are the questions Paul Barrett asks in The Good Black (Dutton. $23.95).

Mungin and Barrett, a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, were roommates at Harvard. What Barrett offers in lieu of journalistic impartiality is an intimate view of a man who was, by all accounts, not easy to know. Raised by a fiercely ambitious, alcoholic mother, Mungin had few friends as a child. Concerned at all times about negative racial stereotypes, he studiously avoided contact with other blacks. Isolated and driven, he prided himself on achievement and his mother’s admonition that he was "a human being first, an American second, and a black third."

Barrett recalls taking a walk with Mungin, through Harvard Square, past a group of rowdy black teenagers. Mungin complained that "maybe if they would spend their time studying, they would make something of themselves." Yet when a young black woman tried to make something of herself through a minority clerkship at Mungin’s firm, he refused to mentor her. Later he apologized and asked her to testify in his discrimination suit. Throughout the first half of the book, Mungin comes off as self-serving and arrogant. It is not until he free-falls professionally that he begins to reach out to the black community.

It is something of a miracle, then, that when his career starts to fall apart, you really care. You watch him run head-first into closed doors and you feel for him. Despite his credentials and billing hours, the firm begins to characterize him as incompetent and lazy. "you fell between the cracks," one partner tells him when he is denied a promotion without an evaluation. His colleagues want him to stay because he is black, but he has no future at the firm. For Mungin, who has dedicated his life to overcoming the limitations of race, there is no greater failure. The whole time he was "bending over backwards to avoid making white people uncomfortable," Mungin never realized that the racial innocence he was confirming was his own.

Barrett, like Grisham, has a knack for writing dramatically about lawyers and their world. But what haunts this reader is the sadness of a man who spent his life trying to be "a good black," only to find out that in the eyes of his employer, there was no such thing.
 
 
 
 
 

Newsweek, 1/18/1999
 

For more information on this book, or to buy it, click here