Law Schools, Racism

Law School vs. TV Station: Showdown Over Racial Bias Questions

The TV station says it's all a misunderstanding. Even if that's true, it misses the point.

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Vintage TelevisionDean William M. Carter of Pitt Law School has informed local television station KDKA that he will no longer appear on their programming following a bizarre and continuing back and forth between the law school and the station over an alleged incident of racial bias against a Pitt professor.

At the heart of the dispute is a KDKA segment on Trump’s initial “Travel Ban/Gussied Up Muslim Ban” (depending on your preferred nomenclature). Everyone agrees that KDKA reached out to the law school to find guests for the piece, which is pretty standard procedure for local TV in college towns.

Where things go off the rails is what happened with Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi, a contracts and commercial law professor whose scholarly interest is Islamic law and the intersection of law and religion. Professor Hamoudi wasn’t invited to the segment, but the law school says the reason why was troubling:

Mr. Hamoudi wrote in a Feb. 11 email that [Pitt spokeswoman Cori Begg-Parise] told him that when she gave his name to [KDKA producer Aviva] Radbord, Ms. Radbord “asked what (not ‘who,’ but ‘what’) I ‘was,’ and the communications director spouted out various titles, thinking the question related to substantive expertise. [The producer] then said, ‘I cannot have a Middle Eastern man on this panel.’”

Mr. Hamoudi’s email said the spokeswoman further explained Mr. Hamoudi’s expertise, but Ms. Radbord, who was apparently looking at the law school’s faculty web page at the time, asked for two specific professors, both of whom are white males and do not work in immigration, Mr. Hamoudi said.

“I can’t ascribe motives,” Mr. Hamoudi said in an interview. “There’s a willingness to talk about this being a religious ban. We can be paraded out to talk about the problems in the community, but when you need an expert, you turn to a white man? It’s hurtful.”

The key revelation here is that the professors the show ultimately wanted were not immigration law professors. They’ll later claim they really wanted immigration lawyers, but this undermines that quite a bit.

But the station responds that this is all a miscommunication.

[KDKA general manager Chris] Pike explained that the producer had been looking for guests to do a taping of a show, hosted by the Post-Gazette’s John Allison, on immigration and sanctuary cities. She first called Wasi Mohamed at the Islamic Center, but he was out of town. She then made several more calls, and a spokeswoman from Pitt called back late in the afternoon.

“At that point, our producer had filled a number of slots on the program and was only looking for an attorney with immigration expertise,” Mr. Pike wrote. “Although the producer does not have a specific recollection of her exact words, if she said she ‘doesn’t need someone like that’ or ‘can’t use someone like that,’ she was referring to what she thought the area of expertise was, and certainly not the individual or that individual’s country of origin or religion.”

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Ultimately no Pitt professors appeared on the panel, but KDKA did feature two immigration attorneys and two Latina women who work with immigrant communities. They seemed to want someone from the Islamic Center, but when that didn’t work, suddenly having a representative of the background barred by the order wasn’t a priority anymore? Curious. Had the channel locked down Wasi Mohamed for an interview, then it might make more sense that they didn’t “need” to have the perspective of another Muslim on the panel, because all Muslims are completely homogeneous and individuals can’t possibly add further insight or nuance. Anyhoo…

Then Pike wrote Hamoudi declaring KDKA’s internal investigation determined this was all a misunderstanding and Hamoudi responded that KDKA’s investigation was a slipshod sham since it never bothered to talk to Cori Begg-Parise, who, as a reminder, was the only unbiased witness to the incident. Then KDKA doubled down on its stance, explaining to the Post-Gazette that they didn’t want Hamoudi because he wasn’t a specialist in immigration law.

At that point, Dean Carter emailed the faculty to say:

“Speaking only for myself, I believe that these kind of ignorant, biased, identity-based assumptions and statements have no place in the operations of any reputable media organization — whether or not they were intend[ed] to offend — and I am appalled to hear of them,” he wrote. “… Withholding my own interactions with this station is admittedly a very small drop in a very large ocean, but it is one small act of solidarity.”

The problem with KDKA’s account is that even if everything they’ve said is true and accurate — and it may well be — their handling of this situation was still problematic.

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People don’t get that “we just want experts in immigration law” means, usually, “we just want to talk about the law as it is, not as it ought to be.” That’s an invaluable approach to a trial, but it’s a pretty silly one when discussing a sweeping change to immigration policy at the stroke of a pen. And wouldn’t you know it, that fixation on discussing what the law “is” almost always excludes the perspectives of the people routinely dumped on by the law. And, worse, it excludes law professors with these perspectives who also happen to have expert opinions about where the law fails and how to best address it.

In this case, the channel wanted an informative discussion of a targeted effort to curb the rights of a large swath of Muslims under existing customs and border law. Even assuming the story began its planning stage as an immigration piece, it’s precisely the intersection of law and religion that Hamoudi spends his life examining. His résumé screams interesting angles! The Bush administration tasked Hamoudi with helping write the Iraqi constitution. He’s worked with the very people who cooperated with U.S. policymakers and that the original ban proposed to lock out. If a producer doesn’t see why that adds to an otherwise run-of-the-mill discussion of how immigration law worked until Trump’s order, then it suggests at the very least an unconscious blindness to what he could bring to the table.

And that’s why this is more troubling than a misunderstanding and KDKA’s repeated efforts to dismiss what happened here miss the point.

Pitt dean to no longer appear on KDKA following claims of bias [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

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