⁍ A white man posted a picture of a group of Black Harvard Law School students and called them ‘gang members’
Authors: The pervasive anti-Blackness in the classroom can make us feel so outraged that we have to speak up.

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⁍ We have to destroy narratives around respectability and meritocracy and promote solutions that uproot anti-Black systems.

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– “It’s difficult for Americans to believe that many of the laws in this country are fundamentally anti-Black, especially when that truth comes from Black students who enjoy the immense privilege of studying law at Harvard,” write the students of the Harvard University Law School in a New York Times op-ed. The piece comes in the wake of a white Harvard Law School professor posting on LinkedIn that the students of the school’s Black Law School look like “gang members.” Gene Smith’s post has since been deleted, but the students aren’t done speaking out. “Putting the burden on Black students to educate non-Black classmates and professors, the school shows how little it seems to care about Black history and Black students’ education,” write the students in the op-ed. “We have to destroy narratives around respectability and meritocracy and promote solutions that uproot anti-Black systems, like defunding the police,” they write. “It’s difficult for Americans to believe that many of the laws in this country are fundamentally anti-Black, especially when that truth comes from Black students who enjoy the immense privilege of studying law at Harvard.” They write that the “pervasive anti-Blackness in the classroom can make us feel so outraged that we have to speak