The Law School as a White Space
By: I. Bennet Capers
Published in: Minnesota Law Review, Vol. 106, 2021
In this moment when the country is undergoing a racial reckoning, when law schools have pledged to look inward and become anti-racist and truly inclusive, it is past time to acknowledge how law schools function as “white spaces.” For starters, there are the numbers. There is a reason why just a few years ago, The Washington Post ran a headline describing law as “the least diverse profession in the nation.” But the argument goes beyond numbers. This Essay argues that law schools—even law schools at HBCUs— function as white spaces. They are white spaces in what they teach, in how they teach, and even in their architecture.
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Lani Guinier makes a similar observation in Becoming Gentlemen, in which she describes trying to find her voice in a room adorned by “the traditional larger-than-life portraits of white men . . . portraits that seemed to speak louder than I ever could.”She later adds that “the gigantic male portraits had captured and frozen in time the alienation from class, race, and gender privilege we had felt as students . . . reminding us that silence was the price of admission.”
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It has now become common, almost de rigueur, for law schools to commit themselves to being anti-racist and truly inclusive. Indeed, it has become so expected that it may even seem like virtue signaling, “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I hope not. I hope law schools are sincere. But my larger hope is that law schools will do more than simply proclaim a goal of anti-racism, or commit to admitting a more diverse student body or hiring more diverse faculty, or commit to incorporating race in their curricula. Even with these changes, law schools will still function as white spaces in terms of what is taught and how it is taught and even in terms of their architecture. My hope is that law schools will have the courage and audacity to reimagine themselves as a different kind of white space—a blank page, a tabula rasa—and to untether themselves from so much that weighs them down. That they will reinvent themselves from the bottom up in a way that is cosmopolitan and then some, as a place where intellectual curiosity thrives, where change and challenge are celebrated, where education itself is a practice of freedom, and where there is no need to tout inclusivity, because everyone already belongs.