For Minority Law Students, Learning the Law Can Be Intellectually Violent

A colleague recently shared an ABA Journal article with me entitled: “For Minority Law Students, Learning the Law Can Be Intellectually Violent.”

In the article, Professor Shaun Ossei-Owusu discusses the deleterious effects that a race-neutral, all-sides-matters approach to teaching law can have on BIPOC students, particularly as they struggle to reconcile that approach with the “world’s racial realities.” Professor Ossei-Owusu offers BIPOC law students two coping strategies in the absence of a more race-conscious curriculum: compartmentalizing and engaging. As the nation continues to grapple with the most recent reckoning on racial injustice and the uncertainty of the future, including the future of race-related trainings, these issues—and the way they are addressed (or not addressed) in law school classrooms—matter and have implications for students’ well-being and academic performance.

(Victoria McCoy Dunkley)