Things Aren’t Black and White
An open letter to my Stanford Law family trying to make sense of the last few days…
Some of the best years of my life are the three years I spent at Stanford Law School (SLS). From long nights in the law library to even longer nights on the dance floors of weddings from Tel Aviv to Sante Fe years later.
The friendships I forged while there have forever changed me. There are professors and Deans who continue to mentor, support, and encourage me. There are professors who cared for me deeply whom I’ve lost and mourned. No matter where I am in the world, I always feel tied to Stanford Law School. It will always be home and my Stanford Law friends will always be my community. In many instances, they are now my family.
That’s what has been so hard about the last several days. As my phone buzzes across time zones on group chats and my social media notifications alert me of another non-SLS friend asking me about what’s happening at SLS, I have been forced to confront what happened to this community I so deeply love and fondly remember. Academic institutions have always been and will always be a microcosm of society. As legislators at every level of government have decided that classrooms and campuses are now a venue for their crusades against wokeness, cancel culture, and critical thinking, students, educators, and administrators are caught in the crosshairs of ideologic wars lacking all civility and that many fear are slowly inching closer towards a civil war.
As I have watched the video of students and U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan several times, I’ve had to confront the fact that my beloved law school is the newest battleground. I’m not interested in who is “right” or “wrong” in this situation. In fact, something I learned at one of our country’s leading legal institutions is that what’s right and wrong is rarely black and white. Yet, we’re living in a country where reducing things to false dichotomies that can be summarized in 140 characters or less is the new norm.
Part of why I’m not interested in adjudicating who is right and wrong in the situation is because this is not some far away battleground where the casualties are nameless, unknown moral crusaders. This is my family. Like all families, some of these relatives are more distant and I don’t know them — but we are family nonetheless. I could go on and on about what Dean Tirien Steinbach has meant to the civil rights legal community in the Bay Area for decades. The battles she’s fought, the lawyers she’s mentored, and the rights she’s defended. I could go on and on about Dean Jenny Martinez who is funny, kind, a legal expert, and always makes time for students. She did it when we were students, she does it now for alums, and she has always been a beacon of light for women of color at SLS and beyond who see in her something once viewed as unattainable, unimaginable.
Perhaps the family members I could go on less about are the current students. Whether it’s the students protesting Judge Duncan’s talk or those who invited him. It has been a while since I’ve sat in those seats or gone to lunch talks to support friends and their student groups or because they offered the best free lunch that day. But I do remember being Black and queer at SLS. I remember being the only queer out woman in my class. I remember the isolation and the otherness I felt when certain cases came up in constitutional law. I remember camping out in administrators’ offices pleading for more support for queer students, students of color and Indigenous students. I remember running for student government president with my gay, Mexican best friend so that we could fight for the SLS we believed in.
I remember being the only person that self-identified as gender-nonconforming in a time before pronouns were something people cared enough to ask about or rally against. But I do know that I had friends in some of the groups that would have invited someone like Judge Duncan to campus. I might have walked by and swiped some free food, but I would not have dared entered the room. Later that week I’d probably meet one of those classmates on the dance floor. We’d laugh. We’d commiserate about the homework and reading we weren’t doing. We’d disagree about the speaker, but there would be no hate exchanged. It was a time before I felt comfortable with the discomfort of standing up for my right to dignity, especially if it created conflict.
Things have changed.
I’m not interested in telling students they are wrong for inviting someone into our family who denies my validity as a person, opposes my right to choose what to do with my body, or thinks my right to vote doesn’t deserve the protection my ancestors were whipped, spit on, and forever scarred fighting to secure.
In fact, I think I’m supposed to remind them that what they did is justified because we all have the right to free speech.
I’m also not interested in telling students who look like me and love like me that their protests were too much. I know that, for them, showing up every day — in class, at a lunch talk, or in a courtroom — is an act of courage. Those in power who deny us our rights have never given them to us because we talked nicely. In fact, they police our tone, style, and method of speech as if somehow doing it differently would magically make us worthy of their love, protection, respect or power.
In fact, I think I’m supposed to remind them what they did is justified because we all have the right to free speech.
Instead, what I am interested in is continuing to fight for justice. What I am interested in is following in the footsteps of the great women of color — specifically Black women — who have graced Stanford Law School with our intelligence, our graciousness, and our respect even when the institution didn’t offer those same things to us. As a Black woman, I love a place and call it home despite the fact that no one who has ever looked like me has been tenured at the institution. I love a place and call it home despite the fact that whenever I’m there I have flashbacks to being stopped by police, asked by students what sport I play, and being told by instructors that I couldn’t enter the classroom where I was volunteering to help at-risk youth because they mistook me for one of the students and demanded I remove my “gang paraphernalia” (which was actually blue clothing bearing Greek letters that proudly signified my membership in a historically Black sorority).
I could care less about a petulant, taunting Judge who already has power or students with extreme privilege who will go on to have their selection of dream jobs no matter where on the political spectrum they fall.
What I do care about is the calls I’ve seen for Dean Martinez and Dean Steinbach to be fired. To be clear, I think the apology letter from the university was the wrong move. How do you apologize for students and staff utilizing their power of free speech against someone who is saying that free speech is important? How do you cower to media pressure to denounce protest as inappropriate when the very core of the lessons I learned there are to always stand up when something is wrong or unjust. How can we buy into a false narrative of cancel culture and liberal snowflakes when the only person I saw on video throwing a true tantrum was a grown ass man who has somehow landed in a position where I am supposed to respect him as a Judge when my multiple identities keep him from respecting me as a human being?
How can we apologize to someone who himself chose not to see through his planned remarks and who kept demanding to see an administrator because he couldn’t fathom that the Black woman in front of him could be a Dean?
I’ve seen students on Fox News basking in their 15 minutes of fame and being celebrated as champions of free speech who feel wronged by one afternoon and one protest, but could never imagine the trauma of being at an institution or part of a profession that was set on the premise that you are less than and that rules, policies, standards of behaviors, and laws exist to keep you othered.
I am a woman of color. I am a Black woman. I am also someone who has had the pleasure and burden of being a woman of color in leadership and a woman of color in a senior position with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in my title. I can only begin to imagine the immense weight and pressure Dean Martinez feels as the first woman of color to be Dean of Stanford Law School. She had to be exceptional to get there. Her every move, email, and apology letter are scrutinized at a level that no white man would ever be held to if he had the job. The stress of always being told you’re doing too much or not enough, the pressure of being told that you’re only there because of boxes you check, and the weight of the immense sense of pride others feel because you are the only one who has ever been there — can be crushing. So, while I may not agree with the letter, I support Dean Martinez. I have seen her tireless fight to make Stanford Law a place where all students can feel at home. I have seen her push to balance her history-making position and power with humbleness and a willingness to be challenged to raise the bar for the law school in every single aspect. I do not agree with the apology letter, but this disagreement will push me towards more dialogue with her and the school, not a demand that she steps down. She is still a beacon of light.
Selfishly, most of my concern over the last several days has been focused on Dean Steinbach. I say selfishly, because I have been in her position far too many times. Hired by a white organization as part of some promise to care more about race, equity, and justice. People doing everything they can to show that I’m welcome in a white-centered space, that I’m needed and that they are happy to have me. Beyond that, we’re often offered up as some sort of Hunger Games tribute and asked to put ourselves out there. To be public facing. To attend events. To speak up. To do everything we can to show how much our organization really means it when they say equity and diversity and inclusion matter. But the same thing always happens with us DEI hires, at some point we start doing our job. Often, we do it well because we weren’t able to ascend to such a position without being on our shit. But the rub always comes eventually. We start pointing out issues, asking for accountability, and asking questions like “is the juice worth the squeeze?”.
Then people start complaining about our approach, we start getting feedback about our communication style or culture fit. As the organization and longtime stakeholders get defensive, we get targeted and attacked.
This has happened to me too many times to count. This is now happening to Dean Steinbach. Like many of the Black women I have talked with over the last few days we see a far too familiar pattern playing out. Dean Steinbach is being set up to take the fall. And for what? For being inappropriate? For saying the right thing but at the wrong time? For standing firm in the face of an invited guest…a Judge no less?
For too many of us, we know that the Dean was simply doing her job. I cannot sit by and listen to people say it’s not what she did, it’s how she did it. That’s bullshit. The reality is, Dean Steinbach should have never been put in that position. Knowing the volatility of the student body and the topic, why was a Black woman put out front as a shield yet again? To say nice things about an institution that could have offered countless other administrators to be that shield? The least the institution could do is to support the warrior they sent to the frontline. Doing true DEI work is a matter of life or death for so many of us. We know that the ability of so many students to believe in themselves, to keep pushing despite threats of harm, and to live as their authentic selves is challenged every single day.
We are often people in organizations with very little power but the best understanding of the fact that to do true “equity” work we have to talk about the redistribution of power. We have to confront and challenge privilege. That’s what students were doing at Stanford Law School. That’s what Dean Steinbach was doing when supporting those students. I choose to center their experiences, not that of the white man at the front of the room whose experience is centered in almost every single one of his daily interactions in ways he does not even notice. Dean Steinbach was doing her job. She was doing what she and so many DEI professionals are hired to do. I hope she keeps her job. I hope all the Stanford students involved, no matter their political leanings, get the dream jobs they so desperately want.
In a few years, some of the students will be judges. Some of them will be deans. Some might even be DEI professionals. I hope no matter where those students land, they look back on this experience and see it as a disagreement amongst family that has gotten out of hand. I hope no one loses anything they truly want. I hope they have time to reflect on the fact that in their positions as future leaders, the things they say, the legal decisions they make, and the free speech they exercise has real world impacts beyond an elite university. People are dying seeking medical care, trying to participate in our democracy, and just trying to go to the bathroom in peace. I heard Dean Steinbach acknowledge that and try to center that while encouraging free speech. If she loses her job it won’t be some victory of the anti-woke mob or anti-critical race crusaders. Instead, it will expose that once again, an institution loved and graced by the patience, service, and compassion of a Black woman failed to offer it back to her. This would not be surprising. But it would not be right. It would not be just. It would not do anything but keep the status quo and remind us that white men in power with hurt feelings have the ability to destroy lives, hurt people, and maintain power.