On Being a Black Student at UCLA’s Mostly White Law School

There are 33 black students out of roughly 1,100 at UCLA Law, and after a similar effort by UCLA undergrads, some of these students have made a video about the representational pressure of their experience, the trap of being seen as either impressive or aggressive. I was reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah last night, and there’s one part where her Nigerian narrator writes, “We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up.”