| I moved to the United States in 2005. I learned the customs, traditions, and quickly learned my place. I was an immigrant, a poor immigrant. A woman of color, who lived in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Rhode Island and didn’t speak the language.
Learning the language was the easiest obstacle to overcome. The others, however, I felt were unchangeable. I graduated from high school, the first in my family. I graduated from Rhode Island College, a nationally unknown and unranked university.
I was the first of my family to do that too.
I was accepted at a top law school making me not only the first in my family to pursue a higher education, but also the first from Rhode Island College to be accepted to a law school of such prestige. Throughout, I told myself that I wanted to be a prosecutor. I wanted to help people get the closure of which I was deprived. I was unmoved in my desire to pursue justice.
But the ground below me started to shake.
Despite my education, despite my now accent-less English (which those around me loved to point out), I was still poor. I was still an immigrant. I was still a woman. I was still black.
The Divide Between Public Interest and Private Sector
I accepted the loans.
I took on the debt because my mother didn’t start a college fund for me and couldn’t contribute a dime to my education. Not with her job at a factory. Not with the breast cancer she was fighting. Not with her loss of work. Not with her income.
So, I came to law school.
Almost immediately, I sensed a divide in the community. There were students dedicated to public interest work, called “the good ones,” and students that were set on pursuing work in private sector, labeled “money hungry.”
All I wanted to do was thread the needle.
I knew I wanted to seek justice, but I soon realized that I didn’t have the privilege to forego the money.
It wasn’t just me.
It was my mother’s desire to own a home one day. One day where she didn’t have to live paycheck to paycheck. It was my desire to one day help others that come after me pay for their college applications, LSAT prep classes, textbooks and all the things that I found myself having trouble acquiring.
I still want to help but have realized that I can do it in different ways.
It’s not that I won’t become a prosecutor one day, it’s that this is not the plan for now. I know people criticize the conversion from public interest to private sector that happens at law school but it’s not necessarily that we don’t care about others.
We just have more to think about.
Money is the “great equalizer.” If you keep us poor, then you keep us down and to raise my community I need a seat at the table—the big table where all the white, middle-class, men are sitting.
Building a Bridge instead of a Wall
So yes, I’ve evolved. I’ve changed my mind because I found that it’s not as clear a divide as it seems. I learned that big law firms help fund public interest organizations. I learned that big law firms do a lot of pro bono work and directly impact communities.
I learned this firsthand when I met a Pro Bono client applying for asylum at the lobby and showed him to the conference room on the 40th floor. The look on his face when he saw the view from up there was enough to show me that there doesn’t have to be a wall between public and private. There can be a bridge.
A bridge I’m determined to walk. |