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| | -- By AfiaKwakwa - 01 Mar 2018 |
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< | I. Preface
I am somewhat uncomfortable writing this essay. At several moments, while outlining and writing my draft, I felt I was exploiting a story that was too close to me, and even truer to those involved, and that I was using this essay as a platform to vent about a system in place that is NOT working for me. |
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> | I. The Incident |
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< | The environment which I am currently a part of has instilled in me a feeling that there is something naturally praise-worthy about reading cases and analyzing precedent, yet something inherently petty and trivial when it comes to writing and reading about the law in action. An ironic feeling given that lawyering is all about making something happen in society, using words. Am I more comfortable reading and attempting to understand the words of others than I am writing and reading my own words/expressing how the law affects me? |
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> | I was in the middle of my first-year of teaching when I heard that one of my students was found dead outside his mother’s house: a gunshot to the head. There were a few witnesses, but none who were willing to step forward. The young man who shot him was a member of the community, belonging to the rival gang. The unfortunate truth is that this story was all too common in our Clarksdale community. The number of principles that rotated through our schools matched the number of students I had to burry before driving away from Clarksdale almost three years later. |
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> | At first, it seemed hard to comprehend the silence of my students regarding their classmate’s death. My views of justice were so deeply embedded in the normalization of what was projected onto me by TV, radio, internet, and a partially privileged upbringing. I had grown up picturing the chaining of bodies as a way of serving justice. In my warped and underdeveloped understanding of the term, righteousness meant punishing the man who killed; it meant imprisoning the killer for actions that resulted in the death of my student. |
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< | II. The Incident
I moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi in 2014. Although I was welcomed by a state filled with hospitality, I also met a world in which racism drove policy decisions, gender created barriers to administrative roles, and teachers were not representative of their students’ backgrounds. |
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> | The truth? Incarcerating an oppressed man is a weak form of maintaining social hierarchy. |
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< | I was in the middle of my first-year of teaching when I received my first phone that one of my students was found dead outside his mother’s house: a gunshot to the head. There were a few witnesses. The young man who did it was a member of the community, belonging to the rival gang. I want to pretend that my student was the only student who suffered this fate, but there were many bodies that left my classroom during that year of instruction. And it would not serve the purpose of this essay to simply tell the sad story of death in my neighborhood – from students to friends to lovers. Because the truth is that it only took one for me to begin to understand why law school. |
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> | II. Background |
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< | III. The Conflict |
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> | My classroom was 100% Black but its walls 100% White. |
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< | The wealth of Clarksdale was expended by the white man made from years of exploitation of Black bodies. That is the truth of the system I was living in, and the truth of how that system manifested itself into the segregation of schools, poverty-concentrated housing areas, the continuous plantation parties organized by the KKK that still epitomize Clarksdale today. I struggled to understand the meaning of Justice within the context of oppression and persisting racial inequality. Justice, as I knew it before, meant punishing the man who killed; it meant imprisoning the killer for actions that resulted in the death of my student. But my views of justice were so deeply embedded in the normalization of what was projected onto me by TV, radio, internet, and a partially privileged upbringing. I had grown up picturing the chaining of bodies as a way of serving justice. But doesn’t police brutality, public school zoning, and district financing all seem to be controlled by the same man who has the power to control the cell from which the guilty man sits – guilty, if correctly convicted, I guess. |
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> | I had grown up understanding Mathematics as a universal language. For my students, Mathematics was a retainer — an area that kept many of my brightest scholars three years behind grade level despite their drive to succeed. For my students, Mathematics was not colorless, because nothing was colorless in their community, and just as sure as they were that their school had failed to give them the education they deserved, they knew that justice could never fulfil its purpose in a system of perpetuating oppression and persisting racial inequality. |
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< | But I was teaching in a space where my students’ existence (and more importantly, their education) was in and of itself the threat to what Clarksdale so clearly compartmentalized as “Black” vs “White” or “Upper class” vs “Lower Class”. Whiteness had always been a source of privilege and protection, and Blackness the threat to that privilege and protection. So in my warped understanding of justice, as I grew up thinking was okay, I had to also acknowledge the idea that I was also okay with entrusting a justice system fueled by years of race and sex discrimination in Clarksdale to incarcerate one of our own – and that somehow that incarceration would bring “Justice” to my student and his family. Incarcerating a man is a weak form of maintaining this social hierarchy. I had to ask myself if a system – no matter how normalized – could serve those whom it was made to silence. |
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> | The wealth of Clarksdale was expended by the white man made from years of exploitation of Black bodies. That is the truth of the system I was living in, and the truth of how that system manifested itself into the segregation of schools, poverty-concentrated housing areas, and the continuous plantation parties organized by the KKK, which still epitomize Clarksdale today. Whiteness had always been a source of privilege and protection, and Blackness the threat to that privilege and protection. |
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> | It was not until the murder of my student, D, that I became the teacher that my pupils needed. And it took for me to become the teacher that my pupils needed, for me to better understand the world that I was living in. When D passed away, I realized the predicament that a poor education system had put my pupils in: as a Black student in Clarksdale’s worst performing high school, it made more sense to take chances on the streets than it did to take chances in the classroom. With few teachers who believed in them, and with societal expectations of failure projected onto my students, their struggle to find meaning in learning everyday became my mission to help them overcome the perspective others had of them. I stopped teaching for the love of Mathematics, and began teaching the subject as a stepping-stone to free movement for my students. For the first time, I associated Mathematics in education with a potential tool for mobility. And as my students improved, I associated their Mathematical growth with an opportunity to live a fuller life than that of so many they had known before them. Mathematics became an opportunity for my students to gain social, cultural, and economic capital so that their class and place in society ceased to be something that others controlled, and became a gift that was in their own hands. |
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< | IV. Why am I Here?
I came to law school do good and to leave the world a better place than how it was when I came into it. But when I got to law school there was something not so free about how I was taught to think – there seems to be some inherent paradox in that phrase itself: Taught to Think. In fact, it seems that had I not taken this class, I might have gotten through law school without once asking myself: Why am I here? |
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> | III. Why I am Here. |
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< | I will be here next year very simply because I came here to define justice for myself… And honestly, because there are not enough people who look like me – who look like my students – fighting to find out what that justice means to marginalized groups and underrepresented populations. Speaking of which, why is this the only class that had anything to say about Black history during Black History Month? |
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> | I am frustrated and tired, and ready to not be either of those things. I am not upset that my students did not all master the state test. I am not upset that my students had to learn to process death before they processed life. I am upset that my students live in a world in which they are attacked before they have the opportunity to arm themselves with the tools needed to defend themselves. |
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< | Although my first semester didn’t go “well” by the definition of what letter grades use to show the extent of our greatness, I began the work that I came here to do. Working on asylum cases during finals, I chose to devote five hours a day to what I cared about: leaving law school knowing that I had developed some kind of a practice which was fueled not by billable hours and letter grades, but by real-world lawyering.
This 80K a year seems to be the value that I am paying for my “license” to the law. But I have yet to figure out is how to grapple with my thoughts about this academic environment, which boasts being a vehicle of justice, yet fails to provide real-life, real-world, support systems to foster the change in the communities we care about – the reasons that drove us to law school in the first place. And instead seems to limit our “options,” in so far as we have any, basing our predicted future success on a letter grade. Once I figure some aspect of that out, I think I will have taken the first steps towards creating my “practice”. |
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> | By teaching in the Mississippi Delta, I learnt that I was capable of equipping my students with one of the most powerful tools of self-amelioration: freedom of movement through education. I lived in the space that I was in, fully embraced my role, and looked for the equipment I needed to empower my students as best I knew how. But the Delta also taught me that Mathematics, education, in a world of blatant inequality, would only go so far. |
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> | I first entered my classroom indifferent about entrusting a system, fueled by years of race and sex discrimination in Clarksdale, incarcerating one of our own. I believed that somehow that incarceration would bring “Justice” to my student and his family. After the incident, I took a step back. I had to ask myself if a system – no matter how normalized – could serve those whom it was made to silence. My experience led me to believe in the importance of equipping each individual with the tools needed to be mobile and to navigate through social norms, gender classifications, and racial pre-conceived notions.
I am frustrated and tired of being a witness to the injustice and ready to begin to affect the kind of change that I need to in a world that doesn’t quite yet feel like my own – that doesn’t quite yet feel like the world that I want my students to grow up in. |
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