Tracy Reeve, the Portland city attorney, has returned a professionalism award to the Multnomah Bar Association after one of her deputies made a racist remark at the award ceremony and which Reeve did not rebuke during her acceptance speech.
“I apologize to the MBA board for my own lack of professionalism in failing to publicly repudiate Simon’s remarks that evening,” Reeve wrote in a June 6 letter, referring to the deputy, Simon Whang, who introduced Reeve before her speech.
Whang wrote his own letter to the bar association board and said he had made “a joke intended to be edgy, that was, in fact, tasteless and offensive.”
He sent a separate email to the board, obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive, that included “the offending part of my joke,” which conflated the N-word and the F-word:
"Professionalism connotes proper, rigid. That’s not Tracy at all.
Soon after I started at the City, I’m in a team meeting about a case with a bunch of litigators, including Tracy, and while we’re talking she casually says the N-word. [pause]
F-word. That should be F-word, not N-word. Granted it was litigators so everyone was using the F-word.
That’s a bad typo. Spell check doesn’t catch that. Tracy, I’m sorry about the 4 seconds everyone thought you were a racist."
Whang said Reeve was not in on the joke, which he described in the email as “inappropriate, offensive, and yes, racist.”
In her apology, Reeve said she had “failed both as an ally to my African American colleagues and as a public servant" by not rebuking Whang during the award ceremony.
“I am responsible for ensuring that all Portlanders can have confidence in the city’s legal representation of their collective interests. For that to occur, our past legalized and systemic racism must be actively acknowledged and rejected, and its present impacts must be recognized and combatted,” Reeve wrote. “I failed to do that from the podium on May 14, 2019. I am doing it now.”
Reeve was not available for comment Friday, and a person who answered the phone at the city attorney’s office said Whang no longer works there. A city human resources officer said Whang resigned.
Reeve said in her letter that her office will hire an equity consultant to provide training. She said she will also consult with the city HR and equity offices “to further our goals of using an equity lens in all of our legal work, and building a supportive, inclusive and equitable office culture.”
Whang was a prosecutor in Multnomah County, a state finance regulator and an assistant attorney general before coming to work at City Hall.
In making his remark at the bar association dinner Whang apparently did not take his own advice, given in a 2015 bulletin he wrote for the Oregon State Bar, that lawyers carefully mind their words.
“In the good old days, we could say something stupid, right the error with an apology, and often suffer only the consequences of morning-after embarrassment and lesson learned,” Whang wrote.
Today, when a careless or insensitive statement can live online forever, is much different.
“Continuing in internet eternity are your misinterpreted jokes and slurs, braggadocio and bravado, good intentions backfiring, ‘private’ messages, overzealous ire, political overreach, dumb posts, drunken comments, terrible tweets,” Whang wrote. “They beat on, borne back ceaselessly into the past, to haunt our future selves.”
-- Gordon R. Friedman