The Horror! The Horror: Unpacking Our Performative Outrage

The legal industry has turned a blind eye to too many injustices at least since I have been alive, especially within its ranks, and now Big Karma is singing. When Dr. King said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere he wasn't just talking about the space and time he was in. He was talking about what happens when tyrannical attitudes are emboldened (as they had been in the Jim Crow south). Injustice loves to expand. It doesn't stay contained harming only the othered individuals in society...do you hear the choir in the background. Big Karma has come to collect all of bad checks we have been writing as a community and it looks like many of us frauds, especially when it comes to checks and balances. Why have we continue to write checks we would never be able to cash and are now upset the feds are beating down our door? I hate to say it, but this is our fault. Our silence has been deafening to those who have been pleading for our help only to have their words fall on deaf ears. Whatever your politics, whoever you are, if you are an attorney who lives in a bubble unscathed by almost anything that happens in our everyday lives on any given day and repeatedly choose to keep your head down as if pretending not to see injustice fights in justice, well you sir, ma'am, are the problem.

Why are we so quick to forget yesterday's horrors even though they are continuing contemporaneously every decade, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, sometimes excruciatingly deafening, but always right there in our face, in our schools, in our offices, in our department stores, in our state, local and federal governments and agencies, on our highways, at the subway turnstile...never a dull moment unless...and the age old story continues. Let's not forget Black Americans and dare I remember the Native Americans, have been terrified of the abuse of power in these Tragic States of America before and after the declaration of independence, where Tom Jefferson told us everyone has inalienable rights but conveniently owned people that were kidnapped and trafficked, repeatedly torn from each other as a tool of alienation and subjugation (among other things) along with the rest of the founding fathers and our eventual first president. Sure they were referencing the likes of Locke, Hobbes, Descartes and Rousseau, political philosophy juggernauts at the time who discovered our divine right, but that didn't stop them and the their descendants from continuing the longest Reign of Terror (which makes Robespierre's seem like a walk in the park) to this very second that I am writing.?The federalists, led by Andy Jackson and pals couldn't wait to get rid of the Articles of Confederation and replace them with the constitution expanding on those inalienable rights...free speech, assembly, religious practice. A right to bear arms and no soldier could come into our homes unless the area was labeled a war zone. We had protection from seizures, from self incrimination, to speedy trials and impartial juries, criminal or civil (I mean what a farce in an industry that is 90-95% white on any given day). We had protection from cruel and unusual punishment, excessive bail and excessive fines. Due process and fair payment for seized property...

Yet, the Native Americans were stripped of this land, then given loans to retrieve the land which they then had to use as collateral...I'm getting a headache just recollecting how we crammed them into tiny reservations while we gobbled up their land. Then we freed the men, women and children we kidnapped and enslaved, promised restitution in the form of reparations, and then we killed Mr. Lincoln because he was really trying his best to move from aspiration to manifested demonstration of those truths that were so self-evident, clawing back the promissory notes to Black people and handing them the first wave of Jim Crow 100 years of lynchings, sexually assaulted daughters, burned crosses in our yards, sometimes they torched our homes, our churches and entire cities and even after we decided surely separate can never be equal, everyone could vote without a barrier, we still have sundown cities in many of the states where they celebrate the confederacy. And then Rodney King, Eric Garner, Amadou Dialo, Ahman Aubery, Breonna Taylor, Sonya Massey and my God my God, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the video everyone posted to see if they could go viral on every platform, terrorizing the Black community by replaying, the horror! The horror...as it were, Mr. Kurtz is not dead and Marlow has become his foot soldier (Conrad).

As you can see, I am completely attuned to not just Black History but the histories of at least three worlds that collided and continue to impact so many globally. I am amazed that I remember all of this because I haven't really been thinking consciously about much of it. So while I am aware of what is presently happening, I am also aware that many have been scared to death for some time. And while I wish it were not so, we were warned repeatedly and we didn't heed the clarion calls of our forefathers, instead we murdered every single one of them. Leaving behind survivors of individual and collective trauma to fend for themselves. I could keep going but...I believe you have right to show your outrage (as do anyone who is publicly outraged) and call out what you believe is unjust. But think about the folks in your sphere of influence who have been scared to death long before Lonnie and Donnie decided to collaborate and consider why you weren't demonstrating outrage in the spaces you had the ability to speak up and protect those invisible colleagues whose names you couldn't get right, whose faces you couldn't recognize after 5 years of sharing time and space working shoulder to shoulder when you passed them on the street.? Consider why you believed it was OK to be quiet in your microcosm (and perhaps still are) yet feel the need to shame anyone who says some variation of this "The legal industry has turned a blind eye to too many injustices at least since I have been alive, especially within its ranks, and now Big Karma is singing." I know being called in to face what you have done, or failed to do is upsetting, but that pails compared to the trauma score our bodies have kept for 500+ years. So yes, I really get what's happening but I am not afraid because I've been doing my part. What the heck have you been doing?