“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This quote, evocative as it is on its own, is the title of an entire essay by Audre Lorde, a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” I was introduced to her work in my Black Feminist Thought class as I worked toward an American Studies degree.
The full essay details the inability of current institutions— in her case, academia specifically— to accommodate for diverse opinions and conceive of radical futures that explicitly contradict the assumptions and goals of those traditional institutions. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Audre Lorde’s words rattled about in my head for years, like an insistent pair of wooden dice, hand-carved and full of splinters, and they rattled the loudest in the fall of 2015 when, not even a year after graduating college, I began to apply to law school.
I came of age during this generation’s defining political movement, that which is for Black lives and against the violence of the Police. I was a high school sophomore living in Oakland when Oscar Grant was killed in the fresh hours of New Year’s Day, 2009. As a sophomore in college, my classmates and I mourned the murder of Trayvon Martin, and in 2014, the nation was rocked by the killing of Michael Brown and the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri.
That Darren Wilson, Michael Brown’s killer, emerged from the ensuing trial unscathed did not surprise me. I could accept that, according to the law as it laid, Darren Wilson’s acquittal was in fact the correct outcome. I instead was curious as to why.
In an editorial I wrote for the school paper, I lambasted the legal mechanism I believed to be responsible: “reasonable fear” specifically, and “reasonability” broadly.
“There is no reason to be satisfied with laws written neither by nor for the people, nor to respect a social order which condones the racist marginalization of certain communities and bodies. A system that rules that the taking of Black lives based on dubious fear is not just. A system that allows Darren Wilson to literally profit from the killing of Michael Brown, from the dollars of citizens so twisted by fear, ignorance and overt bigotry that they laud him for getting rid of “another thug” or “gang-banger,” is not just. In high school, I had multiple classmates in my AP classes who claimed to not be racist yet confessed to crossing the street when a Black person approached on the same sidewalk “just to be safe.” A system that produces young people like this and then commends them as the “best and brightest” is not just—it has failed utterly.
It is a structurally unsound system, rife with hypocrisy and double standards, riddled with the sickness of prejudice, rotten to its core, reeking with histories of subjugation. We have seen how the system treats Black and Brown people. It is in many senses safer to avoid entering such a crooked house and to do work outside of it, operating from the margins and envisioning a new world to build.”
Looking back now, it is clear to see Lorde’s influence on my thinking, down to my subconscious allusion to the “house” as an allegory. Even without attending law school, it was so obvious to me— and is obvious to so many others— that the law explicitly disfavors Black people, Black lives, and any evolving definition of reasonability or justice.
Why then, I asked myself in 2016, was I considering applying to law school? If America was the Master’s House then law was most certainly the Tool that built it (or at least legitimated it). What change did I hope to make, when any change law could make was already anticipated and contained within precedent? What did I hope to learn when the law’s flaws were already so plainly seen?
I still don’t think I know why I went. But I’m glad I did. Because missing from my prior analysis was one thing— how the law viewed itself.
Law, I realized, purported to be neutral. Lawyers and judges purported to be neutral. Seemingly obvious, this mindset implied that lawyers and judges, in their official capacity, viewed reasonability as an objective and quantifiable standard and, while necessarily somewhat elastic, still stable enough to base an entire legal system around.
This is at once both sobering and empowering: sobering in the sense that when even the most progressive lawyers argue, they are (again) using the masters’ tools; here, the tools being agreed upon cultural interpretations of reasonability formalized through precedent. By being good lawyers, and using lawyers’ tools, lawyers hold themselves and modern law as beholden to the cultural mores of the past.
And yet simultaneously, “reasonability” represents a unique backdoor into legal reasoning that, to an extent, circumnavigates the minutiae of law and precedent. Theoretically, by changing what society considers reasonable, we can change entire bodies of law in one fell swoop, without ever winning a court case or establishing new precedent.
I was fortunate to spend one of my co-op internships with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. PLO was formed in 1969 and supported the Black Panthers, taking a successful civil rights case against the police regarding the murder of Fred Hampton all the way to the Supreme Court. Since their inception, PLO has modeled what radical lawyering can look like, and the myriad of tools available outside of the standard lawyer’s tool kit.
In the 1980s, the PLO brought a case against Police Lieutenant John Burge for the systematic practice of evincing false confessions from Black men through torture. For over thirty years, the PLO waged a bitter battle, stymied at nearly every turn by a system that sought irrepressibly to preserve itself through a web of inexorably allied cops, district attorneys, judges, and mayors.
Ultimately, the PLO obtained over $40 million in settlements for torture victims, contributed to the ultimate firing of John Burge, and, incredibly, secured reparations for the survivors of the torture that included not only money but stipulations that the city build public monuments and incorporate the tragic tale into local school curriculum. Although the team at PLO are talented litigators, the victory did not occur solely due to efforts made in the confines of the courtroom. PLO’s efforts oscillated from within to beyond the courts, tapping in reporters and activists to champion the cause when they hit a legal roadblock. PLO attorneys even traveled to the United Nations Convention on Torture in Geneva to raise the plight of Black victims of police violence in Chicago. As attorney Flint Taylor writes in his book The Torture Machine, “[a]s important, we had joined with many others over those three decades– courageous torture survivors, dedicated citizens and activists, families of torture victims, fellow attorneys, political allies, and intrepid reporters– to use our roles as lawyers to help change the narrative… to the accepted truth, locally and internationally, that there was a racist pattern and practice of police torture that reigned for more than twenty years in Chicago; encouraged, condoned, and covered up in the highest halls of power, from police super-intendents, state’s attorneys, and judges to the all-powerful Daley Machine.”
Police enjoy legal protections that assure that their discretion is beyond dispute. What is so striking about the PLO’s example is that they resourcefully and proactively partnered with outside actors as a concerted component of their legal strategy. Yes, their campaign took thirty years— but over those thirty years, the attorneys were able to change cultural understandings of police culture, the definition of torture, and the duties and purview of the courts.
It’s unsurprising that nearly every time a police officer kills a Black person, charges are rarely brought or a grand jury refuses to indict; to expect otherwise is literally expecting the masters’ tools to dismantle the masters’ house of its own accord. Definitionally, to do their job and maintain the interconnected political web that gives police, politicians, and even the courts their power, then police actions must inherently be reasonable. The PLO won a massive victory for the people by bringing in other tools, tools that other lawyers might ignore if they chose to only wield tools that the court would hold binding (it continues to blow my mind that the USA flat-out ignores much of the United Nations’ edicts and that international law is in no way binding on American courts). It took thirty years, but by waging a cultural battle, they were able to attain a legal victory.
Protests, community organizing, and a progressive press have always played this role in our society: of changing cultural perception and ultimately, subsequently, law. While I attended Northeastern, in 2016, the Massachusetts Supreme Court handed down a decision that quickly dominated conversation on campus, both in the classroom and in the commons. The Court held that when Black people flee the police, their flight should not necessarily be construed as indicative of some underlying guilt or commission of a crime.
“[T]he finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO [Field Interrogation and Observation] encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity. Given this reality for black males in the city of Boston, a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report’s findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus.”
Now, this holding is no massive victory against police terror, or for racial justice. Fleeing police is not necessarily indicative of criminality, especially for Black people? Groundbreaking. Again, this is something all of us already knew and understood.
But what is significant here, and what stands in stark contrast to the many, many decisions that grant a de facto deference to the reasonability of police actions, is that the court has deigned to admit that common knowledge— common racialized knowledge— should be included in the court’s calculus. Infamously, intentionally, and detrimentally determined to stay ignorant of the realities of race, the courts here incorporate a realistic cultural truth heretofore unrepresented in precedent. Yes, the attorneys here used police data and an ACLU report to bolster their claim, but would such claims have carried the weight they did without years of Black Lives Matter protests behind them, lending real credence to the claims of Black people?
Every discipline is woven into every other discipline; knowledge bleeds across every boundary, and everything is a little bit everything else, all at once. I don’t suggest that culture is now bleeding in to the law at a greater rate than it has before; on the contrary, I assert that the beliefs enshrined in the law to this point— that running from the police is only ever cause for suspicion, that we can and should trust in the reasonability of our watchers and authority figures— have always been reflective of culture, albeit of a very specific, dominant culture. What excites me, then, is not the idea that, after several legal victories for Black people, and against police, the law is somehow becoming more representative and democratic. Rather, what excites me is that the sudden emergence, or intrusion, of alternate cultural precepts into law may forcibly alter how we understand and teach the law in law schools, and how everyday people conceive of the law in society at large.
Die-hard lawyers may be disappointed to realize that not only is the orderly and sanitary body of law smudged and tainted by the nebulous cloud of culture, and always has been (and that perhaps extra-legal activism is a far stronger tool for change– even within the courtroom— than all the “logic,” rhetoric, and legal knowledge that three years of classical training can muster). It may be a tough pill to swallow to acknowledge that perhaps, by trying to teach the law as the law, we are actually producing less effective lawyers. By pushing for “practical experiences” and internships at law firms and under judges and not also weaving in internships that embed our law students with grassroots organizers, freelance journalists, and families affected by violence, we may cause our students to not just miss out on “exciting learning opportunities,” but actually condemn them to a future where their ability to serve as actual change-agents is limited by their “training.”
But this should excite us? This reality is the reminder of what actually holds together our society, and the reason for any hope we should be allowed to have for our legal system.
We’re all just people, people with beliefs. Law, if it was ever meant to be anything, was meant to be the idea scrawled on the napkin, the precepts upon which we can all agree. It should not advance at the glacial place of precedent, shifting and groaning like tectonic plates, but should instead surge and spurt and advance forward in floods, as fluid as the minds, hearts, and identities of the people it governs.
An awareness of law’s true porousness should create more inclusive lawyers, and more empowered and engaged non-lawyers. All of us create the law, daily, through conversation, through brave and kind acts. All of us set precedent for some future decision, whether by a judge or someone else in our community. All of us wield some power when it comes to co-creating the rules, and crafting society. Not only will lawyers, judges, and law schools more understanding of the role that reasonability and culture share in advancing law give us a more democratic legal system, they can, hopefully, remind everyone, and remind themselves, that the law is, or should be, no more than an agreement, no different than the agreements forged for dominion over the aux-cord on long road trips, or the dip-and-chip protocol among friends at parties.
Law right now fails in this regard. Our adherence to precedent, which deifies “reasonability” as something that can be known and objective as opposed to something wholly cultural and co-created, excludes justice, because it excludes the majority of us. True democracy is difference. Representative law is the understanding that reasonability, justice, and binding precedent should include not just legal precedent, but every kind of precedent.
Law, if it must exist, must lay upon a bedrock of culture, must be intravenously informed by art and science, by history and humanity, by not only fact but aspiration, ideals. Each of the aforementioned elements are attributes of our larger personhood— those inchoate instincts we all possess that let us know when something wrong is wrong, and something right is right.
I close as I opened, with words from Audre Lorde:
“Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”
Richard Raya is a writer, educator, martial artist, comedian, and passionate change-maker. As a Northeastern University School of Law Alumni, he has used his legal education to teach law and history to high school students through Centro Legal de la Raza, an agency dedicated to racial and social justice. Richard is now taking his passion for justice into the public arena by running for city council in his hometown, Oakland, District 5.
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