This is the incident that has led the law school administration to promise a new speech code for lecturers. Paul Nunez, a law student, provides a first-hand account:
A friend of mine . . . told me that you were looking for someone with a first-hand account of the supposed utterance of a “racist” comment during a class at Boalt. Well, I happened to have witnessed the event first-hand and in fact, the instructor was specifically speaking to me when she made the comment. So I’d say I probably have the best possible understanding of the context of the comment. Here’s what happened:
It was NOT the sort of useless racism that one hears from people like neo-nazis and some of the more radical members of Mecha. The class was, in large part, supposed to be a role-playing sort of class whereby we, acting as attorneys, would have to learn to deal with clients and opposing parties (played by the instructors) while trying to formulate and execute a strategy for dealing with the client’s problem. One of the things we had to learn to deal with were crabby, irritable, and imperfect clients. Thus, during one role-playing scenario (in fact, she made the supposedly racist comment while role-playing a negotiation with me in particular), our instructor, acting as the no-nonsense CFO of a small mid-western construction company, commented on the high quality of the company’s product by saying that they didn’t employ inferior illegal Mexican immigrant labor. That was it. Seriously. . . .
If anyone else has a different recollection of this — or the same one — please pass it along.
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