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Law in Contemporary Society
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Good Riddance, DEI. See you never!-- By PaulAkere - 19 Feb 2025 Maybe we should be thanking the Trump administration for taking a hard stance against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Maybe this is a net positive for social justice. Maybe this is a more forceful message than his many racially disparaging comments. Maybe this will compel us more than the hundreds of videos we’ve seen of police brutalizing black and brown men and women. Maybe this reaches places those videos couldn’t. Maybe this time it sustains us. Or maybe this is the fire that Mr. Baldwin described. “These a*******... they always get away" "Are you following him" "Yeah" "Ok, we don’t need you to do that.” Like many in my generation, Mr. Zimmerman’s audio is the first one that I remember hearing. That’s when I first conceptualized the duality of the criminal justice system. I learned that it was more lawful for Mr. Zimmerman to ignore police orders than for his victim to walk home. But this was only the beginning. Then there was Darren Wilson, Brian Encinia, Timothy Lohmann, Michael Slager, Jason Van Dyke, Daniel Pantaleo, and many more. Except in these cases, it was the arms of the state committing the violence against Black men and women. Rarely serving jail time for their crimes. Years passed, and many nights, a different police brutality case filled the television screen, familiar, yet ever new. At the time, we were living under the first Black President of the United States. Truthfully, I thought this indicated that the only way was forward. I read the statistics from previous generations, but they weren’t living under the first Black President of the United States, I was. I saw the state-ordained violence, both foreign and abroad, but I saw this same country elect a Black president. I saw police officers being granted immunity for their extrajudicial killings– but we elected a Black president. Conversations about criminal/racial justice cycled through my conversations just as they cycled through the news. The news sometimes felt like a distant country. My neighborhood was quiet. My high school was a bit more noisy. 4,000 of us packed in there. My closest friends in the school didn’t all come from neighborhoods that were as quiet as mine. The police frequented theirs more than mine. Their perspectives undergirded their feelings about racial progress or the lack of it. Somehow we all shared a similar hopefulness, but when we spoke about the frequency with which we interacted with the police, I couldn’t always relate. I had my experiences, but they seemed to have many more. At the time, I thought we were all in agreement that we would go to college and find our respective corners of the world.The first Black president indicated that the world was ours to have. He went to the most prestigious schools, so why couldn’t we? I quickly began to realize that we actually did not all agree that college was our path forward. I chose college, but when I looked around a couple of years in, I noticed that many of my friends did not. The statistics that I read about on the struggles of Black men in higher education were coming to life, despite the former president being Black. While I was fortunate to escape frequent encounters with the Police, I had to face the solitude that came with being in the higher education. As fortunate as I was, it was still a great challenge. It was made easier by the courageous people who blazed a trail before me by braving the space during more difficult times. Many campuses, including the one that I attended, honored their bravery by dedicating rooms to affinity groups. At the time, these communal spaces felt integral to our survival on campus. A haven that doubled as a headquarters, a place where we could peacefully strategize how to improve Black performance in higher education. We talked about everything, increasing college matriculation, better academic performance, parties, police brutality, more diverse food options, Barack Obama, job opportunities, history, and everything else we could think of. I now find myself in law school. State-ordained violence persists. The duality of the criminal justice system persists. But now the state is on an even wider rampage. The sitting president wants to repeal the few attempts the country has made at making higher education and professional spaces more diverse. For me, and many like me, it doesn’t matter how many encounters we’ve had with the police, this is a direct attack on the hope we were given. The existence of a formerly Black president cannot stop the current president from mandating that schools do away with programs that seek to increase Black access to higher education and beyond. They told us that a great education was the way to equality and now already limited access is being further restricted. I thought that past generations fighting this fight meant that I would not have to fight it too. For a while, I also thought that the existence of this fight was deplorable. I now realize that we are more equipped than ever to handle it and in a more permanent way. The statistics also show that there have been increases in Black American success in higher education. There are more of us in the fight than ever before. Candidly, I thought that there were better people than myself to vocalize the urgent issues plaguing our community. I understand now, every voice must be lifted. So again, maybe we should be thanking President Trump. Or at least, maybe I should be thanking President Trump. There is no way for me to avoid the proximity of this attack. Turning off the TV will not help.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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