Find My Way
“Im just a nigga with a broken heart tryna find my way back home”
Dababy’s ballad Find My Way is an apropos illustration of my experience of attending law school while Black. Dababy’s song is a tale of success, heartbreak, remaining true to your roots, pride, and murderous protection of self and loved ones, just like law school. For every 20–30 law students, you might find one that did not come to law school almost purely for the benefit of others. Most Black law students have an experience or experiences that compelled them to come to law school: watching a teenage girl facing a murder charge for driving a car, witnessing the very police — who are supposed to serve and protect — murder or brutalize your neighborhood, watching the minds and bodies of the men of your community sacrificed to the machine that is mass incarceration, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.
The journey just to get to law school (“success”) is fraught with obstacles and heartbreak and involves leaving family and friends behind, even if just temporarily. And even as law school changes you, it is a daily struggle to remember why you came in the first place, and to stand tall and strong in the face of a culture that tells you in both grand and subtle ways that you don’t belong; from the standardized tests that no one ever taught you how to take, to the study habits that perhaps you never had to develop because of a higher than average yet obscured intelligence. Intelligence that sometimes comes from the need to stay 10 steps ahead in order to survive the streets you grew up on.
During law school, Black students rarely have anyone in their family that has either completed college or earned an advanced degree, and even those don’t compare to the fast-paced, cutthroat,academic environment that is law school. And so the Black law student must rely on the one or two other Black students in class, or on the one or two Black professors. But most times those people are not available or their personalities just don’t mix and so the Black student only has empathetic allies left to turn to, allies that often look like the oppressor.
But how do you sit in a class talking about a husband bringing a tort claims against his wife, or how to distribute the $30k inherited from granny and the $100k retirement account after a divorce when neither you nor anyone in your community has any lived experience with suing anyone, much less with taking your wife to court because she placed the automatic air freshener at the exact height of your eyes?
Or how do you talk about “criminals”? Even though your and your community has plenty of experience in criminal law, its only because either you know someone who was a victim, or you know someone who was a predator. Not because your community is any more violent than others, but because the police target and brutalize it more often. How do you comprehend a legal system that at every turn oppresses your community and finds a way to further chip away at the concept of equitable relief?
You do not. You infiltrate the system and you tear it down from the inside. Nationally, the population of Black lawyers has held steady at 5% for who knows how long. But revolution is in the air, and the law and its culture are not immune. Black Spring has come to the United States again, and a generation of lawyers sown in the streets and fortified with the law are ready to murderously protect their community by ballot or by bullet.
They just have to find their way.
*Disclaimer: Black is not a monolith, there are just as many experiences like mine as there are that aren’t.
