“The portraits of black professors, the ones that bring me and so many other black students feelings of pride and promise, were defaced. Their faces were covered with a single piece of black tape, crossing them out of Harvard Law School’s legacy of legal scholarship.”
I can’t be more eloquent than Michele Hall, Harvard 2L, in this photo essay about what happened at Harvard Law School today. And I’m not going to analyze what happened in the usual terms of proof and harm and culpability and intent that will no doubt be played out over the internet in the next few hours and days. I’m just going to say that, people often reflexively think and talk about these events in language that reveals racial identity and allegiance. “Why do they behave that way?” “What about our kids?” And I often implicitly invoke my own non-Black, non-White racial identity as I try to mediate dialogue about race, talking about both Black people and White people as though I were an outside observer.
I don’t feel like doing that today. Today, I’m saying “Why did they do that to us? Why did they do that to me?”
Seriously, why?