When I was a law student, there was no one who looked like me on the walls. Then Heather Gerken became dean — the first woman to lead @yalelawschool — and she put up portraits of living alumni in the halls. We brought Kavi here when he was three— and he found Mommy!
Last weekend, I was invited back to speak to alumni on the movement we are building for revolutionary love. This is how I started my address:
“Being back in this classroom brings back memories. I remember sitting right here and wanting to disappear. That first year, learning the law was like drawing close to a language of power that wanted to colonize the others ways of knowing and thinking and reasoning. I would have given up. I would not be here with you now, if it weren’t for the intervention of my small group professor Reva Siegel. She said to me: ‘You are not here to let the law change how you think. It is your job to change how the law thinks.’ And so I stayed in law school. I made it my secret mission to make the law more loving.
“Now I’m back in these halls, a decade later, and my mission is not so secret. I believe that love – Revolutionary Love – is the call of our times. I am here to invite you to imagine how the love ethic can be the foundation of your life and work.”
I didn’t know it, but Reva was in the audience. It was an emotional reunion. Reva is among the most renowned scholars of Constitutional Law and we had much to discuss on the state of things! We talked and took a walk through the law school and found the portrait. Time stood still. I realized I would not have arrived in my life — chosen such an untraditional path out of law school, taken on this mission to reclaim love as a force for justice — without her and @MikeWishnie, my two brilliant law school mentors. They knew how to love me into being. A line from @brynnsaito’s poem came to me:
“Hold fast to the ones who set you free.”
May you be seen and heard into being. May you see and hear others into being. May we hold fast to the ones who set us free.
Thank you for visionary leadership Dean Heather Gerken ♥️
