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Commencement Advice for Outsiders: Now and Then, Let Go of Resistance
I was invited to speak at a gathering of women of color graduating from law school, and I said yes. Many of the women had been my students. I looked from the podium to their brown and golden faces, their hair long and black, kinky and short, in braids or shorn, their minds enriched with the powerful architecture of a first-rate legal education, their futures open, and my heart really did sing.
I’m a happy lawyer — if my daughter someday wants to attend law school, I’ll encourage her to. But there are grim and entrenched ways that the law, and therefore law school, is hostile to the views and even existence of the marginalized. This is unsurprising: American law is profoundly path-dependent, dedicated to honoring logic, values, and decisions formed decades or centuries ago. It is also steeply hierarchical — laws are the codified opinions of people in power, opinions that almost always protect their interests regardless of whether those interests honor the wider range of human experience and need. Consider this foundational characteristic of the law — deference for decisions made long ago and almost exclusively by a tiny handful of people (white, financially-secure men) with immense political and social power — and it is easy to see why women of color, and other groups that have been systematically disempowered, can find…
