​As I was leaving a post-demonstration meeting, I passed the portraits that had been marked. The tape was gone but a classmate had begun putting up small messages of encouragement on each affected portrait and leaving out pens and pads of post-its to help others do the same. She asked me to help and I agreed. Less than 2 minutes later, as I was putting up a notice explaining the point of the post-its, a man in plain clothes approached me and identified himself as a Harvard Police officer.

9 hours.

9 hours today organizing around a racist act at law school.

That’s 9 hours where I’m not reading legal texts.
That’s 9 hours where I’m not writing three papers for class.
That’s 9 hours where I’m not building an outline for an exam.
That’s 9 hours where I’m not reviewing my notes from the semester.

9 hours responding to press.
9 hours talking to administration.
9 hours drafting letters, emails, and articles.
9 hours consoling Black students who feel vulnerable.

9 hours of not eating or drinking.
9 hours of being reminded that someone who you go to school with thinks its okay to be racist. And people are defending that person.
9 hours brainstorming demands and ideas for next steps.
9 hours being told to draft a solution to fix racism at Harvard.

I am a student.
I don’t get paid to do diversity work.
I literally pay to go here.
I am paying to attend a law school where I am also working full-time to defend my Blackness.

Diversity work is a full-time job.
We need a diversity office dedicated to fixing these problems.
We need people with expertise drafting solutions to racist and classist problems, not just students with good ideas.
Students need to be a part of the process, but, students of color should NOT bear the burden of teaching students how not to be racist.

Do we ask female students to come up with solutions to teach male students how not to be rapists? No. We hire trained professionals so that women can focus on being students.

So WHY do we ask students of color to come up with solutions to solve racism? Why? Why? Why? We, too, are students. We, too, suffer. We, too, have to study, and do well, and graduate.

Can we live, actually?

‪#‎BlackOnCampus‬
‪#‎BlackAtHarvard‬
‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬

It’s Thursday, November 19. 

HLS awoke to black tape covering the portraits of it’s few black professors–I guess it’s cuz we got a little too loud this week. 

I’M FIRED UP. WON’T TAKE IT NO MORE.

When you walk into school in the morning and see students have taken black tape and crossed out the faces of black professors 

Telling the administration about racism, and them telling YOU to solve it. 

One of my Facebook friends (who attends HLS) linked a video of one of our conservative, male classmates speaking on Fox News. Less than an hour after posting, there are 6 negative comments solely focused on his appearance, including one which saying he looks like a serial killer. 

I disagree with the position this student takes, but … seriously? Can you imagine what would happen if someone posted such a video of one of our liberal, female classmates and several people commented solely on her appearance? Isn’t that the sort of thing we don’t want to happen? Can’t we just disagree with someone’s views (and really, there’s plenty to disagree with and dispute here) without saying he looks like serial killer?

When your perspective does not count because it’s ‘biased.’

At one point my Harvard Law School ID card stopped working so I went to the Harvard ID card office to get a new picture. I made small talk with the older white lady at the front desk who told me they would issue me a new ID. We went over to their makeshift photo booth and after seeing my awkward smile in the first photo attempt, I ask to take another one as I playfully remarked, “I look stupid when I smile, I need to do more of a mugshot look.” We take the picture and head back to her receptionist desk where she comments that the picture came out nice. She tells me that before she can issue me the card she needs to see one form of ID. So I pull out my Driver License - a picture of a younger me with a huge afro. Think Huey from The Boondocks:

With a long line of people behind me she takes one look at my Driver License and exclaims, “Wow! You really look like a criminal here!” Some days you fight it, some days you don’t. I chose not to. Instead it was me who tried to lessen the awkwardness by letting out a half hearted chuckle. To which she responded, “Oh it was just a joke!”

Jokes aside, it reveals a deeper sentiment of how white America often views us. Granted I may have given her an inch, but damn white folks love taking a foot.

When your friends are steady decked in Harvard gear as a matter of proof and protection more than pride. 

When diversity and inclusion is couched in a need to be “professional” instead of the need to recognize the humanity of your peers

So there’s a guy in Parker’s First Amendment class who, when we were talking about sexual assault issues, said that he was jealous of Parker’s youth because he thought men “really lived” then, “knew how to have a good time,” and that now men are expected to curb their sexual urges, which he said he found “painful.” While Parker smiled encouragingly, students in the class made eye contact and confused signals to one another. We moved on, and that kid saying offensive things came up less and less often in outside conversation. 

Here we’d been thinking he was a relatively typical men’s-rights-activist bro. Then, we found out with the professor’s press release last night that the kid who makes rape jokes is actually the respondent described in The Hunting Ground, described as having roofied and raped another HLS student and her girlfriend. As the faculty knows, his leave ended this semester. 

Last night, Parker and 18 other professors published a press release arguing that this guy (they name him in that letter) had been unfairly characterized as a perpetrator in the documentary, given that his HLS expulsion was overturned for lack of evidence (except the evidence of two women’s consistent testimony, apparently irrelevant) and that he was only convicted of a lesser included charge in his criminal rape trial (because we all know conviction = truth, especially in rape cases).

Giving the rest of the 19 professors the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wouldn’t have had the stomach to sign that letter had they heard the things the guy’s said in class this semester. Maybe they would even have spoken up if any student joked about rape, putting aside what they secretly knew about the past. Parker, what the hell is your excuse? It’s never great when, at very best, you’ve been willfully ignorant. 

Most of us assumed those 28 faculty members who wrote the sexual assault letter last year were just upset the University hadn’t deferred to their suggestions for the policy, and responded with their Boston-Globe-disseminated temper tantrum.

But there were also rumors of a case from a year or two before that had divided the faculty, though, and no surprise there was a back story to the 28’s letter; egos and power have to be implicated for that many podium faculty to say anything about a justice issue, even if it’s as ridiculous an issue as college systems seeming too anti-perpetrator. About the mystery case, we knew there had been screaming matches in the faculty vote, and an expulsion had been overturned on appeal.

Now all the details are public. In their recent press release, 19 faculty members themselves drew our attention to Brandon Winston, who sexually assaulted Kamilah Willingham and Kamilah’s non-HLS girlfriend a few years ago. Kamilah’s recounting of her assault starts at minute 14 of The Hunting Ground. And Brandon Winston, after a leave while his HLS case was appealed and then while his criminal case was tried (read the related Slate article to learn about some really *inspirational jury deliberations), is back at HLS.

So to the original 28, and now the 19 pro-perpetrator die-hards, thanks for using a critical safety issue (and some impacted students) as pawns in your power games with the law school administration, university administration, OCR, and each other. Winning educators.

There’s a high-level DOS staff member who can be a bully. He recently ignored a female leader of a campus organization’s rationales about a decision the org’s leadership had made, and kept saying she’d just acted based on emotions … My friend (the female leader) immediately called him out on his sexism in that situation and he backed off.

It seems like this guy held a grudge after my friend’s assertiveness though: it came to a head when another DOS staff member reported something she’d overheard my friend saying back to this higher-level guy. My friend was overheard saying to another student (outside the DOS office) that the guy “could be more supportive” of an org activity. In response to hearing this comment about himself secondhand, the guy sent my friend an email demanding she come in for a meeting to discuss that statement at a time that he chose – basically, he yanked her in for saying something unflattering about him to a third party. In the meeting, he passed my friend a copy of the extremely vague “Harvard Law School Community Principles” from the appendices to the student handbook, and made thinly-veiled threats about how all students who are disciplined are given that document as part of their charge, and that she should be more “respectful” in the future.

So, basically, at best he’s unaware of how he comes across and at worst he’s deliberately trying to force a student into compliance as part of re-asserting his power over her, after she alluded to what she felt was sexism. Students should be able to express ourselves (especially to other students!) and push back on DOS decisions without this guy using the disciplinary respect code to try to silence us.

It bothers me when professors refer to cases like Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu as “wrongly decided” and quickly move on. This implies that the logic and reasoning of those white male judges in 1857, 1896, and 1944 should have naturally led to a different result. Instead of dismissing these cases and moving on, we should ask ourselves what they really mean. What do they say about stare decisis? About the common law? About how we interpret our Constitution? 

Dismissing cases that are plainly racist legitimizes a legal system that continues to inflict devastation on millions of black Americans every day. It’s not overt racism that kills us–it’s the silent kind.

Today in class, we discussed the way peremptory challenges might be used as a vehicle to facilitate discrimination. In defense of those challenges, one student described libertarians and “right-wing religious people” as “crazy people” who might be justly removed from juries without cause, because they might bring their views to the jury. The commenter described this demographic as “less than 1% of the population.”

This comment made me painfully aware of my status as a political and religious minority at Harvard Law School. Even though 25% of the U.S. population identify as Evangelical Christians, 31% as socially conservative, and 11% as libertarian, these are clearly underrepresented minority groups at HLS. But we are here, and we shouldn’t be dismissed as “crazy people.”