Lawyer Complains That ‘White Race’ Attorneys Shouldn’t Have To Hear About ‘White Privilege’

uring last week’s installment of the Maine State Bar Association’s “Bar Talk” series, attorney Leah Baldacci chimed in to share her “concerns” about anti-racism efforts in the state. “I would like to note that many of the attorneys in Maine… despite having white skin have had their struggles in order to achieve all of the academic achievements they have made and become attorneys and I am certainly one of them,” Baldacci said on the video chat with the Acting Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court.

Baldacci is the daughter-in-law of the former governor of Maine. It is, truly, a hard knock life.

As the legal community begins… an introspective process about racism, I would like to caution attorneys… [that] telling attorneys that are of the white race that they have ‘White Privilege’ is antithetical to the goals of searching for a way to make race a non-issue in our community…

I was very surprised during some of the discrimination training that I’ve received through the State of Maine that ‘White Privilege’ was a topic that was raised many times. and felt as though there was no other purpose but to shame the individuals who were white in the room…”.

Whenever you hear language like “the white race” you know you’re buckling in for a wild ride.

Oh, and if you’re skeptical that her critics are playing “Gotcha” games and cutting her remarks out of context, that was a passage that she put on her own LinkedIn page so she, mind-bogglingly, thinks this makes her look sympathetic.

Let’s break down where she careens off the rails here. First of all, when she describes the goal of making race “a non-issue” she’s beginning from a flawed premise that dooms all of her conclusions. The vision of universal color-blindness misses the point of struggles against racism just as surely as universal androgyny would miss the point of sexism. The problem in both cases isn’t that there aren’t differences but that those differences shouldn’t be the basis of discrimination. To that end, understanding the ways in which white people have advantages is pretty important to understanding how discrimination works.

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