“Good Trouble”

What tools do you need to sharpen in your toolbox?

Welp, as of yesterday, I am a law student AGAIN.

How can an attorney be a law student?

Besides the annual requisite continuing legal education (“CLE”) credits that all attorneys in the State of Georgia need each year, I haven’t taken any form of legal class since I became an attorney. And CLEs are usually more like 3-hour seminars or conferences that concluded in just 1 day. But as of yesterday, I am a student in a 12-week course titled “Racial Equality and the Law (REAL).” This is a free online course offered through the University of Akron School of Law and is being taught by Professor Brant T. Lee.

A beautiful thing about walking in your purpose and manifesting things that you want for your life is this: sometimes opportunities will just find you when you’re not looking for them.

I was notified about this course through the Georgia Public Defender Email Listserv. Unsolicited. A law school was offering a course for free open to the public. Why not circulate the information, right? But rather than quickly skim this email and then delete it without paying it any mind, I was captured by the course title, read the course description in detail, thought for .25 seconds about whether I really wanted to commit to a 12-WEEK LAW SCHOOL COURSE, and then proceeded to register for the course. I even shared the course with a couple of friends I thought would be interested. I mean, it’s free, the content will be awesome, so why not?!

But yeah. I did a thing. I’m enrolled in a real law school class. And I plan to take this seriously and show up and do the work!

This is a 12-week course where Professor Lee will be leading a 1-hour class every Wednesday. Here are the weekly class discussion topics listed in the syllabus:

• Week 1: Introduction: Why This is Hard: Talking about race is hard. Before we dive into this material, let’s talk about why that is.
• Week 2: Democracy and the Constitution: What it means to have majority rule when we’re talking about race.
• Week 3: The Equal Protection Clause: Thurgood Marshall and the evolution of rights.
• Week 4: The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Focusing on Employment Discrimination.
• Week 5: Vocabulary: Implicit bias, privilege, fragility, and other (kind of) new words.
• Week 6: Immigration and “Other Non-Whites”: Including a personal story.
• Week 7: Wealth: The fundamental disparity, and how it was created.
• Week 8: Education: After “separate but equal.”
• Week 9: Health: How and why we live and die.
• Week 10: Criminal Justice: The history of law and order.
• Week 11: Whitenss: Why it makes you miserable.
• Week 12: Where do we go from here: Looking Forward.

The topics of this course are what led me to write this blog post. Granted, I only attended 1 class so far, but it had me definitely looking forward to what the rest of the sessions will have to offer! I won’t be able to give a genuine report about this course until the end of the 12 weeks, but I am writing about it now for 2 reasons:
1) to highlight how excited I am to see these issues being discussed explicitly and publicly in a higher education environment, and
2) to highlight how relevant these issues still are today.

Yes, it’s 2021. Yes, we have seen and heard a lot of “changes” being thought about and maybe even implemented when it comes to race and race relations. But no, we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.

Not too long ago, I tweeted a string of tweets where I basically said “this time last year I was contacted by many white people asking me how they can do their part and become educated on systemic racism and white privilege, and they may have reshared a post or put #BLM in their bio, but yet I haven’t heard from then since then…” Over a year has passed and they only reached out to me once. And they reached out to me once seeking information from me. Information that would require me to exert energy during an already traumatic time for me and my people. They haven’t reached out since to chat. To check-in. To share what they’ve done.

Racial injustice and inequality and definitely how it all is embedded in the law is not a one-time conversation to be had. It’s not something that will just change or disappear overnight. And it’s definitely not something that will resolve itself by placing a BLM hashtag in your bio or below your Black square IG post. It’s something that requires WORK. It’s something that requires PERSISTENCE. It’s something that requires GOOD TROUBLE.

Fighting against racial injustice, racism, discrimination, etc. is not a moment, but it’s a movement. I am a Black, female attorney and I went ahead and registered for this course because I know it is necessary for me to take. I represent people who are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. I represent people who are targeted and arrested based solely on their race. I represent people who don’t trust a system where the cards are stacked against them once they come out of their mother’s womb. Becoming more knowledgeable in the area of where race and the law intersect is CRUCIAL to me sharpening my skills as a defense attorney. Even though I still have 11 more weeks to go, I am confident that by the end of this course I will be a better attorney and will be able to better serve my community because I have taken advantage of this opportunity to manifest this for my life.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28, NKJV.

Moni Jay, Off the Record