When we open the door for others
On DEI, affirmative action, and the importance of opportunity
This month’s guest on the Babblery podcast is retired judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell. I first interviewed LaDoris about her work with the African American Composer Initiative. In both interviews, she gives a passionate defense of what she calls today’s “dirty word”—DEI.
In my interview with LaDoris Cordell on The Babblery, she tells the story of how she became a judge. It was 1980 and she had established a private law practice in a majority-Black town because no firms would hire her, even with her Stanford Law degree. One day she received a call out of the blue from a judge she’d never met:
“He said, I’m trying to bring diversity to the courts, and we have a system here where you can just be a judge for a day and you could preside over a small claims case. I said, sure. I wasn’t thinking about it much.
“And then I don’t know if a month or two goes by and then I get a call. Your name’s come up and it’s just a random thing and can you come down and preside over a small claims case? And I’m thinking, sure, why not?”
I love the casual way that this happened and I love that LaDoris followed her parents’ advice, “ When the door opens, step through it.”
But what I love most about this story is what comes next.
On hair, culture, and understanding
LaDoris arrived in court that day, wearing the black robe for the first time, not knowing what to expect. Neither she nor the two women she found waiting in the courtroom expected this: three Black women and a case that only a Black judge could truly understand.
This was in 1980, and it ironically coincided with the release of a film that brought consciousness about hair braiding to the white majority—10, starring Bo Derek resplendent in her braids.1 But in 1980, it’s safe to say that no judge in the Bay Area court system had intimate knowledge of Black women’s hair—except “judge for a day,” Her Honor LaDoris Cordell.
“ I walked in and then I stopped and I looked and I stared, and the litigants stopped, looked at me and they stared. And then I was like, what? The litigants were two Black women. One was suing the other to get paid for braiding the person’s hair. And the person who got her hair braided, the braidee, said, no, I’m not paying her because she did a lousy job braiding my hair.”
You can hear more about LaDoris’s experience in the full episode, but I want to focus on the fact that while her experience follows the much-maligned path of affirmative action—she admits she got the invitation to judge simply because she was a Black woman—it also tells the story of why diversity and opportunity has made the United States strong.
When the door is opened for you
For a number of years I was a member of a women’s choir, the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, that toured nationally and internationally. So I spent a lot of time out and about with one of my favorite people in the group, a young woman with the most angelic soprano voice—who happened to be disabled.
On one trip, she and I were going to get ice cream. She was ahead, a small woman using crutches, and the man who entered before us had clearly seen her. He pulled the door open, entered, and let the door slam shut in her face.
She was furious, so as we ate our ice cream we talked about it. I admit I did the “himpathy” thing—I tried to defend him. But she was adamant: able-bodied people often went out of their way not to help people with disabilities.
That conversation has really stuck with me: our two perspectives show how differently people see the same incident. She saw the mistreatment that she suffered when people who could clearly help her would deliberately go out of their way not to help. In contrast, I saw the embarrassment that people have when they fear that someone will see their offer of help as condescending. The embarrassment doesn’t justify the action, of course, but I believed that it was a partial explanation for the behavior. She begged to differ.
The rugged individualist
American culture has a real problem with shaking itself free of our own myths, and perhaps the rugged individualist is one of the most damaging. I will admit to loving parts of this myth, because I’ve always focused on “individualist” in the sense of not needing to go along with the cultural stream. But more often, an “individualist” in practice is very much in the mainstream: he’s someone who doesn’t feel a responsibility toward other people.
I do think that a lot of Americans are literally embarrassed, even if they don’t admit it, that others need their help. Our culture doesn’t leave much room for taking pride in helping others when we’re supposed to be pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We all grow up with this idea that the man on the horse with his gun can ride into town and save the day, but we also know that the man doesn’t “get involved”—he saves the day and rides off into the sunset.
The reality of America is that we didn’t get strong because rugged individualists like Pa Ingalls took his vulnerable wife and children to “Indian country” alone, but that they only survived, over and over, because people reached out to help them. And they didn’t survive because the people who helped them all had the same skills and experiences—they survived because of the diversity of skills and experience that made up their community.
DEI is the story of America
Conservatives currently hate something Ronald Reagan celebrated: America is built on diversity. Our biggest economic powerhouses—most notably science innovation and entertainment—happened directly because of the diversity of our population. Diversity, equity, and inclusion occurred as a slow but natural process as each wave of white immigrants came to this country. The Kennedy family in one generation experienced “no Irish need apply” job advertisements; in another they were at the pinnacle of politics. Jews were disdained and segregated in their home countries, which also happened to some of the first generation in the US, but their children became our top scientists and founders of the entertainment industry.
DEI also happened naturally in limited ways for non-white Americans. African Americans were enslaved, but their descendants created the blues, which morphed into jazz, and is now the foundation of modern American music. Asian-Americans were excluded, defamed, and even locked up in concentration camps, but their children and grandchildren built their lives back up against the odds.2
But then progress got stuck—entrenched racism only allowed so much—so state and federal governments tried to use law to unstick it. And that’s why someone had to hold the door open so that LaDoris, the only judge in in town qualified to settle that case, could step into the courtroom that day.
This isn’t an argument for resegregation
When I say that LaDoris was the only qualified judge, I don’t mean to say that we need to resegregate our court system. On the day that she stepped into that courtroom, our court system had been segregated. White judges didn’t have access to the cultural information that would have helped them find a just resolution of the case before her. It’s safe to say that the white men dominating the courts at that time were very unlikely to know any Black people personally. They may have had some formal interaction with Black court employees, but most of their cultural knowledge of Black America would have been through entertainment. And the only person sporting cornrows in their entertainment was possibly Bo Derek.
LaDoris’s book, Her Honor, demonstrates that the value LaDoris brought to the courtroom wasn’t just her experience growing up in a segregated town, being rejected from all law schools except Stanford and probably being accepted there for reasons like DEI, and being unable to find a job after graduation because she was a Black woman. Her value in the courtroom was also that as our society diversifies, as more people unlike each other work, learn, play, and eat together, we become stronger.
LaDoris’s book is full of descriptions of the research she had to do in order to perform her job well. Despite her relatively wide experience in the world, there was a lot she didn’t know. Judges are expected to adjudicate cases that don’t touch on their personal experience, because we can’t and shouldn’t seek to pair cases with judges’ personal attributes.
But the current diversity of the bench in California3 is good news for all of us. A more diverse judiciary is a stronger and more just judiciary simply by its design. An Asian judge today wouldn’t necessarily have the personal experience that LaDoris had, but if she were faced with a case involving two Black women in a braiding dispute, she’d have ample resources to draw on in order to make a just decision. A white male judge in 1980 was very likely not to have those resources.
Not forgotten anymore
I first met LaDoris when I interviewed her for the Babblery episode “Not Forgotten Anymore: The African American Composer Initiative.” In that interview, LaDoris made a strong statement about being a founder of an organization that stands against MAGA’s push to erase DEI:
“At a time like this when to even say the initials DEI can get people in trouble, we are standing up to that and saying, This is about equity and inclusion and diversity and music. Particularly the music world should always be about this. It’s flying right in the face of those who would say, DEI is out, don’t even say the word. We say them loud and clearly.
A life and career like LaDoris’s is the perfect example of the strength that comes through diversity. Sure, some of us enjoy being the rugged individualist who doesn’t go along with the cultural current. But all of us should be aware that when we open the door for someone not like us, we shouldn’t be scared that they’ll be offended. We should be proud that we gave them an opportunity to step through.
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I saw the movie. Every teenager I knew saw the movie. I remembered the cornrows, but reading the description of the plot now is just simply horrifying. “Later that night, Sam and George argue over his treatment of women and his habit of spying on the intimate acts of a neighbor with his consent.” Ew! Yes, we have come a long way, baby.
And then, of course, the “model minority” wedge was used to try to divide and conquer non-white people who were finally achieving success.
https://newsroom.courts.ca.gov/news/2026-judicial-demographics-report-california-bench-continues-grow-more-diverse
Was the man embarrassed or concerned about being seen as patronizing by someone who had a disability? I don't know. Would he have held the door for someone else? Which someones else? Older people? Pretty white women his age? Maybe he'd have been a jerk to anyone.