The Hidden Wound.

• Author: Garrow, David J.
• Position: Review

The story of a black lawyer who tried and failed to ignore his race

Paul Barrett's powerful and poignant book about the life and legal career of his one-time Harvard Law School roommate has lessons aplenty for anyone interested in affirmative action, employment litigation, or judicial racism.

Lawrence Mungin made it from a single-parent household in a Queens, New York, public housing project to Harvard College and then Harvard Law School before finally having to acknowledge the inescapability of race after joining the all-white Washington office of a Chicago-based law firm.

Mungin's reluctant acceptance of his own racial identity is the unifying theme of Barrett's sensitive but not uncritical portrait. But lurking just behind that theme is the fact that Mungin's decision to escape as completely as possible from the world in which he grew up left him a fundamentally isolated and lonely person. Barrett recognizes the "rootlessness" that characterized Mungin's early adult life, but Mungin's reserved nature, and Barrett's obvious respect for his friend, seems to have kept

Barrett from asking many potentially intrusive questions. Barrett is explicitly willing to question the wisdom of Mungin's decision to move to Katten Muchin & Zavis in 1992 after several unremarkable years of early law practice at the two well-known firms of Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy. Barrett suggests that notwithstanding all the energy and drive Mungin had demonstrated earlier in life (including four years of very successful Navy service), by the time Mungin graduated from law school he was "coasting" professionally as well as personally drifting. Barrett believes that an attentive and savvy young lawyer should have recognized just how potentially troubled the Washington office of Katten Muchin was before taking a job there, but even in retrospect Mungin resolutely disagrees.

The centerpiece of The Good Black is Larry Mungin's experience at Katten Muchin. Barrett's narrative implicitly emphasizes two distinct but not inconsistent themes: (1) many if not most large law firms often behave thoughtlessly and callously toward young lawyers, and (2) the ways in which Mungin was sometimes ignored and at other times demeaned at Katten Muchin can but need not necessarily be viewed or explained through a racial prism.

Barrett underscores both how Mungin's unhappy experience at Katten Muchin did not feature any "racist insults or overtly hostile acts"...