A personal reflection on structural racism (Part 1)

On my first day of law school I woke up early to perfect my hair, makeup, and outfit (that no one would even see because we were on zoom). I was so excited to see the faces of my section mates. I knew that I would stick with these people for the entirety of the school year. Since I did not already know anyone who was a law student, I realized these were the people who I would lean on for all of the upcoming struggles of 1L year. I logged onto my first class's zoom meeting and eagerly began scrolling through the faces of Martin Luther King Hall's Class of 2023 Section D. To my surprise, I was the only Black person in my entire section at King Hall.

Since then, I have been the only Black student in more courses than those in which I have not been. I have literally never been in a more non-black space in my life than here at King Hall. This reality has greatly shifted my view on the world.

This isn't my first time at a predominately white institution (PWI). However, in undergrad I was surrounded by Black people in both of my majors in African-American Studies and sociology. By choosing these two majors, I isolated myself from the statistical reality that only 5% of the student body was the same race as me. 

I remember feeling slightly uneasy during my first weeks of general education classes. Going from my high school that is 84% minority to a sea of white faces will do that to anyone. As Michelle Obama states in Becoming, when she recounted her time at Princeton, "It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall...". After I found my people, however, I honestly tuned out the white sea. If anything, I started seeing them as the minority because I didn't know more than a couple dozen of their names whereas I knew almost every Black person on campus. I would never have guessed these names made up only 5% of the school's population because they were the entire institution to me.

At law school, however, there is no escaping the white sea. It's everywhere. Especially during the confines of zoom school during my 1L year. This has made me think long and hard about the world around me, specifically about this country's commitment to white supremacy. In No, I Won't Stop Saying "White Supremacy," Robin Diangelo gives the sociologist's definition of white supremacy as "...a highly descriptive term for the culture we live in; a culture which positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal." 

I first learned about structural racism as an Af-Am major. We discussed redlining and I thought back to my hometown, Merced, California. In Merced, the south side of the city is majority black and brown. Ironically, Martin Luther King, Jr. Way splits Merced into the nice side of town and the hood. One of my UCLA professor's gave us the link to a website that allowed us to enter the name of a city to see how it was once redlined. It showed an almost exact replica of the racial makeup of Merced till this day. 

While discussing redlining, we learned about the different ways it impacted minority communities. The obvious way is the crippling effect it had on these communities' ability to generate generational wealth through buying, owning, and passing down real estate. I thought back to my family moving almost every year while I was growing up; we had to do that after our lease was up. This never stuck me as odd because a lot of people around me also moved a lot. I had no clue of the privilege it is to grow up in the same home and neighborhood throughout your childhood, and have that home passed down through generations. 

We then learned of environmental racism. I thought of mornings, when my brothers, who grew up with debilitating asthma, always showered first so they had enough time to take their thirty-minute-long breathing treatments before we left for school. 

We learned about food desserts and zoning laws. I thought about how I did not know what an organic food was until I moved to Westwood, Los Angeles because there were no healthy grocery stores in or near my neighborhood where I grew up. I also thought about the plethora of liquor stores in walking distance from wherever I lived. While attending a Merced City Council meeting I learned that our city council did not allow liquor stores to be zoned on the north side of town because they "interfered with the quality of life." This same quality of life was not maintained for those of us who lived on the other side of the railroad tracks. 

We learned about how property taxes fund public schools at the local level. Because property values in different areas are vastly different, the tax revenues that come from different neighborhoods are also vastly different. This creates thousands and thousands of dollars in funding gaps per student. I thought back to high school sporting events when we traveled to the nearby suburb of Turlock. We came to refer to the schools there as Beverly Hills academies because of the glaring differences in resources. They had nicely architected, two-story, brick buildings with fountains in front. Our campus was riddled with portable classrooms and chipped paint. They had huge, freshly painted gymnasiums and football stadiums on campus. Our home games were played at Merced Junior College because we did not have our own facilities.

This is a small portion of a long list of different ways structural racism has influenced the world around me. My undergraduate education opened my eyes to most of this while fueling my long-standing desire to become a lawyer. Growing up, I already felt like the world around me was racist. I actually used to believe that there was just a lot of racist individuals who made individual decisions over and over again that eventually made the world the way it is. I had no clue that what I was really experiencing were racist laws, racist structures, and racist policies. 

My younger siblings and I at my undergraduate graduation