Knoxville needs affirmative action for lawyers
by Ta Kisha Fitzgerald
The recruiting practices of law firms, businesses and government agencies in the Knoxville area should be reevaluated in regard to race. The majority of the above-listed places recruit attorneys from the University of Tennessee College of Law; it is not surprising, therefore, that African Americans comprise a minuscule percentage of the application pool for jobs in the local market. African Americans constitute less than 1 percent of the Knoxville bar population.
The College of Law graduating class in May of 2000 was made up of 155 graduates, of which 14 were African American. The firms and agencies that base their recruitment efforts only at UT would receive at the most 14 applications from African Americans. The challenge is making the applicant pool more diverse.
The first step in diversifying the workforce is to broaden the places where the company or agency recruits. Efforts would be beneficial if they were made at Howard Law School in the District of Columbia, at Southern Law School in Texas or any other law school where African Americans make up more than 10 percent of the graduating class.
This expanded effort should be made in addition to the present recruitment efforts. Clearly, Knoxville companies should target the College of Law first when seeking to hire attorneys, because the graduates who attended UT have already shown a propensity to live in Knoxville. However, finding the most qualified person for the job should be the driving factor. The larger and more diverse the applicant pool, the more likely the company will find the most qualified applicant.
This is essentially the definition of affirmative action—increasing the applicant pool and making an effort to inform a diverse population of any employment openings. Affirmative action has nothing to do with hiring people solely on the basis of their racial classification.
Arguments against affirmative action are typically based on two reasons: opposition to quotas and opposition to racial preferences. The definition of quotas is maintaining a racial balance in the number of employees that work for a company. The definition of racial preference is preferring one race over another whenever a position becomes available. Both of these are court-ordered remedies to rectify past discrimination. In order for the court to order either one, a person must prove in court beyond the preponderance of a doubt that a particular company or government agency has a history of such discriminatory violations. Furthermore, the individual bringing the suit must be able to identify the victims of these discriminatory policies, after which the judge may require a company to act.
Neither of these mandates have anything to do with the definition of affirmative action. Quotas and racial preferences cannot be a company policy nor written into statute, because such would be stricken down as a violation of the equal-protection clause of the Constitution of the United States of America. All affirmative action means is opening up the process to everyone, not just Caucasians and African Americans but all people of different ethnicities.
If law firms, companies and government agencies in Knoxville would seek to employ affirmative-action policies in their recruitment of attorneys, then there would be a greater chance that there would be more African-American attorneys in Knoxville.
Ta Kisha Fitzgerald is an assistant Knox County district attorney general.
January 4, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 1
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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