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personally i see myself as a daughter of the great migration that tells you everything
you need to know about me
uh... i have this very firm
fundamentalist disciplined background married to
this northern opportunity that my parents migrated from the deep south to give
their children
and i was able to to marry those two and and to really sort of bring about my
own version of the american dream
well I'm not a publisher and so my view doesn't doesn't count but I think daughter of the
great migration would have been a great title me too
ultimately at age thirty roughly you went to law school
why did you do that
well I had big reasons and I had little reasons the little
reasons were some of the little reasons where that i had such a checkered educational past
and i had had
such yearnings mixed with such self-hatred and low self esteem
i can do anything I can't do anything
and I'd always loved school and by the time i think I was thirty three when I started law
school
by then there had been so much water under the bridge for me intellectually and experientially
in terms of my own maturity that I thought law school would be a lot of fun
and i really just that was my idea instead of going to disneyland I'm going to go to
law school
the pure intellectualism of it
um... fun is not a mistake most people would make about law school
I'm probably one of the few people in history to have a good time in law school and to
have a lot of extra time I wrote a novel in law school I started writing in law school
uh... but also i just I needed to go to law school and just kick its but i needed
to go to the bastion of everything that america had been telling me I couldn't aspire to
that I wasn't good enough for
and just look it in the eye you know and and shake it by the lapels and say you know here
harvard and so I did that
uh... and also on a more defensible level
uh... by then
that's not indefensible by then I had become so politicized
i had been radicalized at one point but then I sort of swung back to
politicized about social issues and race and gender but most of all class
and I where as most of my life I'd been sort of single mindedly devoted to
improving my life
i came to understand that my life was emblematic of millions of other
have-nots who were being kept in their place as fodder for this system
and i really wanted to beyond keeping my own belly full I really saw a need for
people like me
to get in there and fight for people who were voiceless and who had no
purchase on on this system and in in every way legal capitalistic
the police state who are just pawns and I thought people like me
i can bring something to this discussion
this excerpt is brought to you by the Massachusetts school of law