Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School by Yung-Yi Diana Pan
Abstract
A third of U.S. college graduates go on to graduate or professional education of some sort, with 9% of Americans earning a master's degree or higher and 0.5% becoming lawyers. For this reason and others, studies of becoming a lawyer contribute to our knowledge of elite formation. As with most advanced education, socialization is central to learning in law school, and it has been documented extensively. One not only learns the law in the three years it takes to earn a juris doctorate. That person also comes to love the law, live by the law, and think like a lawyer. And although we know something about the gender and class dynamks of socialization to the legal profession, until now evidence has been sparse about em bedded racialization in what "becoming a lawyer" means. In Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School, Yung-Yi Diana Pan uses the experience of Latinos and Asian Americans becoming lawyers as a window into these processes, as well as others of interest to stratification scholars: ethnoracial formation, assimilation, and the reproduction of inequality to name three. The focus on Latino and Asian American students is fresh, opening space for the analysis of immigrant experiences and identities within the book's broader task of understanding racialization within a particular professional context. Indeed, the experiences of these"new" immigrant groups are what racializes identity formation in law school. Professions serve as a key mechanism for integration of Asian Americans (who may be subject to model minority stereotypes) and Latinos (who may be subject to stereotypes about legal status) into society's economic mainstream.