Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Bamboozled!!!


Picture it: yesterday, the head of recruiting emailed me personally to ask if I could interview a law student for a summer associate position. I have interviewed candidates before but usually I volunteer to an office-wide request for interviewers. I have never been personally sought out to interview. The mystery was solved when I read the candidate's resume: she attends law school at a historically black college. Got a black candidate, get a black interviewer (you know, to make sure the candidate knows we are a diverse organization and equal opportunity folks and so forth and so on...).

Well, wouldn't you know when I opened my office door today to greet said candidate this girl was anything but black! More like the opposite! White as fallen snow and hair so bright she could light up a dark ass room. Of course I knew to broach the race subject would have been quite inappropriate (not to mention illegal, I think) so I tap-danced around the subject..."So how do you like ____ Law School?" She said with a huge smile: "I love it!" I'm thinking...I bet you do! Takin' all our men and polluting the earth with your racially confused mungrell children (myself included). Uh huh... (I'm kidding...I actually think she may swing for the other team, but that's a whole 'nother level of diversity).

The entire time she sat across from me I searched for any bit of ethnicity in her face, or hair. I got nathan. Not one kink in her super smooth bright blond highlighted hair. It got a tad akward when we spoke about her affection for swimming and water sports and I said I love the water as well, but my hair just makes it difficult for me to swim on a regular basis. She quashed any chance of her maybe being a tiny bit black by going the "my best friend is black" route. Well not exactly, but she tried to connect with me by saying her best friend at law school always talks about how she "sweats out" her hair when they go to the club...um, thanks for the info! I said nothin' about sweatin' out my hair, fool.

Meanwhile, do you think it'd be in bad taste for me to paste this post onto my firm's Interview Evaluation form under "general impression"? Or perhaps just simply, "Bamboozled." She was super nice but I just can't get over her choice of law schools...why?!

2 comments:

Pleats 'n Cleats said...

That's hilarious! Well, she either, a) is doing a study on being a white girl in a black school, b) she hopes to get interviews through "affirmative action" - people see black law school so they assume she's black - and she has to know that, or c) she just really likes black people. Or that's the best school she could get into.

You decide.

Thembi Ford said...

I dont know why SHE went to an HBCU law school, but I bet your firm will be happy to hire her to play with their statistics! Shes like Maggie (Marisa Tomei) from the early seasons of Different World, yeah?

I wonder if she uses the n-word while 'stomping the yard' or whatever goes on in those places.