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Subject: Fwd: Fw: [TheWall] APALSA Board Statement Regarding Free Speech and Recent Events
Date: October 19, 2021 at 7:50 PM
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From:
Date: Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 7:50 PM
Subject: Fw: [TheWall] APALSA Board Statement Regarding Free Speech and Recent Events
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From: TheWall on behalf of Lee, Aaron Bryce

Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2021 7:10 PM

To:
Subject: [TheWall] APALSA Board Statement Regarding Free Speech and Recent
Events
Dear W’all,

The APALSA Board would like to build on the messages sent by the Dred Scott Society, FGP, YLW, and BLSA to support and affirm
the message of our classmate Marina Edwards. It is critical for us as Asian American and Pacific Islander students to work in solidarity
with our peers – especially our Black peers who have been disproportionately impacted by this community harm and taken on
disproportionate labor to repair it – to underscore the impact that this incident has had on our YLS community.

We unequivocally condemn Trent Colbert’s email for its anti-Black and racist language. Whether it was Trent’s intention to do so is
entirely beside the point – his words were racially pejorative and they deeply hurt Black people in our community. That is where the
media coverage, the institutional response, and the dialogue at YLS should be focused – on the harm that was experienced by Black
students.

Trent isn’t the only person who made mistakes that caused harm. Harm was also caused by people in the media who chose to
write stories painting the Federalist Society – a multi-million dollar organization – as a victim instead of centering the pain
experienced by Black students; our white peers who saw Black students and other students of color so generously
responding to Trent’s hurtful words with grace, generosity, and opportunities to learn but stayed silent; and all of us who
benefit from this institution – which was founded and continues to profit off of genocide, slavery, and imperialism – without
reckoning with the power, privilege, and positionality we hold.

It is critical to highlight how the subsequent media coverage and social media discourse following the original incident has reinforced
anti-Black and racist discourse under the visage of free speech. Many commentators have diminished and gaslit Black students who
called out this racist behavior, falsely equivocated the racialized harm with “niceness,” painted Black students as afflicted with
“crippling sensitivity,” and diminished the real harm experienced as nothing more than the latest instance of cancel culture. Moreover,
some media coverage of the email has even facetiously compared YLS to Maoist reeducation camps. What the actual fuck! Not only
is this offensively racist in and of itself to APALSA members, especially those of us with direct family who lived through the Cultural
Revolution, it also distracts from and misleadingly reframes the core problem as one of “free speech.” The problem is not free
speech.

As Dean Gerken’s email noted, free speech and diversity and inclusion work together. The problem is how conservative pundits
have invented a crisis of free speech in higher education as a way to distract from the substance of what they are doing in
the world – accelerating the climate crisis, propping up the prison-industrial complex, eroding the rights of marginalized
communities, deepening economic inequality, and waging perpetual war around the world.

To move forward as a community from this harm, we must all acknowledge, reckon with, hold ourselves accountable to, and work
together to never again replicate this harm. We especially want to uplift the work that Yaseen Eldik has undertaken to attempt to call
Trent into a productive and critical discussion.

We urge our classmates – not just now, not just for the rest of our time in law school, but for the rest of our lives – to accept
calls for active, cooperative, and critical dialogue. Working to build anti-racist practices doesn’t mean that we will not make
mistakes – it means that we will listen and accept when others say our words or actions harmed them; it means that we will continue
to learn across lines of difference; it means that we will show up and speak up when we recognize harmful and hateful sentiments
against not just our own in-groups but against any marginalized communities of color; it means that we will hold ourselves accountable
to the communities we call home; and it means we will work together to heal.
We hope that the YLS community can begin that healing process now. However, that process will not – and should not – happen until
those who have inflicted harm put in the time to dig deep within, find the decency to apologize, build trust, and actively and
consistently prove that they are willing to engage in our collective project of anti-racism.

In solidarity,
The 2021-2022 APALSA and SALSA Boards
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