Blasé: Deviant Lawyers and the Denial of Discrimination

By Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Using 60 interviews with a range of minority law students and early career legal professionals (primarily differentiated by race, gender identity, religion, and disability), this Article illuminates the cruciality of empirical Critical Race Theory to understand individual deviance within the legal profession and develops a framework – blasé – for considering interactional violence that is not legally or socially cognizable as discrimination but still causes harm. These data reveal that discrimination was minimized and denied to varying degrees for all minority respondents. However, for genderqueer respondents whose identities had not achieved a high degree of sociolegal legibility, these denials had low contestability and were often without contrition. Unlike microaggressions which might have resonance in common cultural parlance as operationalizations of structural violence, what distinguishes blasé discrimination, I argue, is the ordinariness of the act in interactional parlance alongside its relative unlikeliness to be seen as problematic when confronted. It is this possibility of defense and justification in the face of being challenged that makes blasé and its ambiguous parameters worthy of our attention in identity jurisprudence. This exploration of the blasé response to discrimination sheds light on the opportunities available for revealing structural inequalities when analysis begins from the perspectives of peripheral actors.