Censorship and Consciousness
At Harvard Law School, I broadly defined censorship to include the fundamental human rights that Black Southerners in the United States are routinely denied.
Semi-annually, I serve as a guest lecturer for a course called Restorative Practices at the University of Texas at Austin. Housed within the College of Education, the class uplifts a philosophy that is integral to my legal and policy work; under this framework, a holistic analysis is applied to a kid’s perceived misbehavior; the result of such a process would both repair the breach and keep the child in their classroom - rather than subject them to the well-documented harms of exclusionary discipline.
A few years ago, I delivered a version of the presentation I’d been refining for years. I walked through the history of school policing in the U.S., noted the bipartisan commitment to law & order that directly opposes the humanity of Black children, and discussed present efforts to fully dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. After my remarks, I engaged in a few brief post-presentation discussions and received a new follower on social media. It all represented a standard flow of a very gratifying routine.
In late 2023, the student who followed me on social media reached out. She was now a student at Harvard Law School, and she wanted to touch base about civil rights legal advocacy. We caught up virtually, and I appreciated how our conversation represented the ability of connections within movement work to be sustained over the years. At the end of January, the same comrade reached out as a member of the Bell Collective for Critical Race Theory at Harvard Law School and formally invited me to present at their 2024 spring conference.
I smiled with slight disbelief and awe as I read the email. I was denied admission to Harvard when I applied as a prospective undergraduate student, and I didn’t even apply to Harvard Law School given my college GPA and LSAT score. Yet, over a decade removed from that self-doubt, here I was as an established civil rights lawyer with an opportunity to speak at the institution. I quickly confirmed my attendance and started to broadly outline my remarks.
As the flow of the conference took shape, it appeared as though I would discuss the present widespread bans of critical race theory in K-12 classrooms across the United States. However, the conference organizers soon reached out to see if I might serve on a panel focused on Black Radical Censorship. I gladly accepted, though I did begin to reflect on just how I wanted to tailor my remarks to cover this critically important topic.
A few days later, I visited the central branch of the Austin Public Library; I borrowed a copy of Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Professor Derrick Bell. I figured it would be well worth it to return to the source and hear from the former Harvard Law School professor & critical race theorist himself - the one who took a leave of absence to protest the virtually non-existent number of Black women on faculty at the time.
I began reading and smiled at how witty he was. It’s hard to categorize the book in a genre, but I recommend it nonetheless. I took notes from it and began to deeply consider my personal & professional journeys up to this point. How indeed has the censorship of Black radical thought played out across American history? How could I personally testify about it?
I arrived in Cambridge by train on the 19th after spending a couple days in D.C. I had an outline in hand, but I was also excited to potentially shift it based on the wisdom gathered from other panels & speeches. I enthusiastically brought my notebook with me to each session I could attend. The opening keynote speaker, Leah Watson, highlighted the jarring point that 17.7 million children in the United States faced some type of censorship effort in their schools in 2022.
I heard Ryna Workman, a Black student at NYU Law, recount their experience of facing discipline from the institution in response to their calls for Palestinian liberation. Fatema Ahmad painted a vivid picture of the horrors that the War on Terror has brought to Muslims in Boston, with 10% of them having been visited by the FBI in the decades since 9/11. Kelly Brotzman noted how books like dictionaries and The Lord of the Rings are routinely banned from prisons - simply because they have maps in them that could be ostensibly used to plan an escape.
I took in the innovative philosophies and approaches that guide this work in such hostile conditions. Josie Duffy Rice shared her imperative perspective that policy is influenced by culture, and culture is shifted by storytelling. As someone who often leads introductions with the fact that I’m both a lawyer and a writer, I appreciated the acknowledgement of how creative endeavors must factor into various fights to dismantle the myriad harmful systems within the U.S. Christopher Blackwell offered the powerful meditation that crime is a canard, and the work that we’re doing to abolish the prison industrial complex is baton-passing work.
All of this knowledge filled me up as I prepared to speak on March 22 with Justin L. Brooks. Justin and I officially met the day before our panel, and we chatted about our lives and work over happy hour. A resonant theme emerged; Justin and I are men of faith who consistently apply the lessons acquired in Black churches to how we navigate the world as twenty-first century Black lawyers.
Justin delivered powerful remarks inspired by his academic studies as a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Harvard, and he drew on his experiences as public defender right after he finished law school. I began my reflection by highlighting some passages from Divining a Racial Realism Theory - one of the chapters of Faces at the Bottom of the Well. The first one appeared on pg. 92 of the copy I had:
Racism cannot be vanquished by the enactment and vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws.
I launched into my personal history as my parents, aunts, sister, cousin, and niece tuned in over Zoom from Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. I am a fourth-generation graduate of America’s historically Black universities; I am one of several lawyers in my family. Despite these personal achievements, Tallulah, Louisiana - my mother’s hometown and the current home of many relatives - faces perennially contaminated water.
In 2024, Black lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, and preachers in the American South squarely stare down the reality that clean water is not promised. No level of advancement for any individual person within my family has shifted that fact. So, from my perspective, censorship indeed curtails the ability for Black people to speak freely on various topics; however, it also shows up in the very material reality that - en masse - Black people don’t have the homes, food, water, healthcare, or social services to comfortably exist from day-to-day. For Black folks, censorship is a topic that is simultaneously personal and collective.
As I concluded a prepared speech, I looked to pg. 98 of Faces at the Bottom of the Well:
[We] must articulate our differences clearly, even when our candor is upsetting to those who prefer diplomatic dialogue.
It made me recall why I center Black people first and foremost in my work - there is no comfortable way to state that anti-Black racism governs American policy at every level in 2024, but it absolutely must be expressed.
As we entered a question-and-answer period, Justin and I discussed a range of topics, including how the Black church offers a practical infrastructure for engaging in political education and providing the material needs of folks in the face of organized abandonment. I named Black queer feminism, socialism, and prison industrial complex abolition as the animating philosophies for my work, and I uplifted the racist character & fitness investigation that the Texas Board of Law Examiners conducted against me as a very tangible example of Black Radical Censorship.
A thought occurred to me as this incredible panel wrapped up, and I didn’t share it in that forum. In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Derrick Bell emphasizes that, as Black folks, we shouldn’t overlook the process of living. As I walked away from the Bell Collective’s 2024 Censorship and Consciousness Conference, I felt that in my soul.
Indeed, many fights await us - presently and in the generations to come - but I take joy in actually living as a Black person in the United States in 2024 with liberation on my mind & sustaining communities in my corner.
More awaits.
A LAWYER FOR THE PEOPLE!