Conflicting Justice

-- By AfiaKwakwa - 01 Mar 2018

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.

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?

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.

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.

III. The Conflict

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.

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.

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?

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?

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”.

This is a good first draft, because it gets the ideas out where you can see them for yourself. The difficulty accepting that this is what you want to write, need to write, has not resulted in preventing the draft from existing. Improving it as a piece of writing is pretty easy: you want to increase its coherence. As you reread it you can see where some sentences should be changed or removed in order to make the rest of the paragraph around them flow better, keep the reader's attention focused. By focusing the writing you help the reader, and the story of your self itself; you contribute to the movement from Mississippi to New York; from watching society to learning how to change it; from feeling powerless as a witness to the way in which what seems like "simple justice" becomes nothing of the kind when the context around it soaks everything in long-continued injustice.

I need to say again about first semester grades that they mean nothing. They measure the speed with which you acquired "law talk." But as a teacher you are aware that measuring speed of initial uptake (particularly in language acquisition) isn't very useful. It doesn't tell anything about the ultimate nature of the learning, or what will happen to the knowledge gained in the student's mind. First semester grades are an example of the fallacy of mensuration: that what can be counted is what counts. So, substantively, the final paragraph of this draft, what might have been called the conclusion, seems to me only an example of some weight you are left to carry that does not in fact exist: a form of the obscenity of injustice from which we can free you with the truth.

Making this better as writing also means, therefore, making you better, in the sense of healing, too. Your education here is not under control other than your own: from here on out you can learn as much by doing as it suits you to arrange. Knowing why you are here helps you to fashion how you learn. The next draft can get you further to understanding your practice than you presently suppose.

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