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.