Images of some staff contributions to Gowling WLG’s Black History Month campaign circulated on Twitter, where they attracted highly critical responses.
Images of some staff contributions to Gowling WLG’s Black History Month campaign circulated on Twitter, where they attracted highly critical responses.
One of Canada’s largest law firms is apologizing after statements by firm members that perpetuated racist tropes surfaced on social media.
Gowling WLG (Canada) tweeted on Monday that it asked firm members what Black culture and history meant to them, in honour of Black History Month and said it would share the responses on Instagram. Images of some of those responses were posted on Twitter and were widely described as tone-deaf and containing anti-Black stereotypes.
In two posts, white men (one from Quebec and another from the firm’s U.K. office) appeared to reduce Black culture to their love for Black music and athletes. In a third, an unidentified firm member described meeting their daughter’s Black friend and remarking he could be described as “well brought up.” The firm member said their daughter never mentioned her friend’s race, adding, “That night, I went to sleep with the hope that one day, race-based conflicts would forever be behind us.”
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The firm apologized on Wednesday with respect to the latter post, which was made into a screensaver and displayed on a computer internally before someone at the firm posted a shot of it online this week. Gowling CEO Peter Lukasiewicz said the fact that someone felt the need to do that indicates they did not feel “empowered, safe or comfortable raising the issue internally.” He said the firm has “a lot of work to do there” to make sure people do feel they can raise such concerns.
“We made a mistake,” he said in an interview with the Star on Thursday, adding that the firm is being “rightly criticized” for posting a message that was not culturally sensitive. “We’re determined to learn from this, with the help of people inside and outside the firm,” Lukasiewicz said, adding he met with Gowling partners Thursday and planned to meet with other firm members in the coming days.
The incident comes after the racial reckoning spurred by the U.S. police killing of George Floyd last summer, after which many Canadian law firms vowed to do better. More than a dozen, including Gowling, signed the BlackNorth law firm pledge, promising to employ Black, Indigenous and People of colour (BIPOC) in 3.5 per cent of senior roles by 2025.
According to the Law Society of Ontario, just 3.2 per cent of the province’s lawyers were Black, in 2016, compared with 4.7 per cent of Ontario’s population and 8.2 per cent of Toronto’s.
Sandra Barton, a Gowling partner who sits on the board of trustees and chairs the firm’s anti-racism committee for Toronto, said some of the Black History Month posts “never should have gotten through our vetting process,” adding, “It was a failing on our part that they got through.”
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Barton has been working on strategies to recruit more Black and Indigenous law students and lawyers and hopes they will continue to consider the firm.
Charlene Theodore, who became the first Black president of the Ontario Bar Association in September, said she was “frustrated and exhausted” when she saw the posts about Gowling. She recently launched “Not Another Decade,” an OBA initiative to fight inequality, and has made it her mission to help law firms change.
“That means moving past performative and ineffective initiatives to showing law firm leaders how to take new action to create better and more diverse workplaces.” Theodore said this involves hiring more Black leaders and creating environments where lawyers from diverse backgrounds know they have equal opportunities for advancement.
Having conversations about how to get there is “never an excuse for getting these things wrong now,” she said, adding, “If you have power to hire, fire or in any way effect the lived experience of people in the workplace, you have to know that getting equality, diversity and inclusion right is a core part of your job.”
Hadiya Roderique, a consultant, researcher and speaker on equity, diversity and inclusion, said the Gowling posts were inappropriate and she was disappointed “that these tropes still exist and people still peddle in them.” Rather than such “performative allyship” she would like to know what firms are doing to recruit and retain more Black lawyers.
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She said law firms should turn to Black or BIPOC-owned communications firms or consultancies, but should not rely on their BIPOC employees. “Around Black History Month, Black employees often get asked to do extra work without any recognition, compensation or anything else being taken off their plate.”
Roderique detailed her own negative experience with Gowling in a 2017 essay in the Globe and Mail that described her decision to quit her job as a Bay Street lawyer. She recounted attending a cocktail party at Gowling during the student recruiting process when a male partner asked a group of white men about themselves but looked past Roderique when he got to her.
“I was made to feel invisible and othered during that cocktail party. Things like this make me think not that much has changed from that experience almost 15 years ago.”
