Law Schools

Yale Law School Students Ask 'What The Actual F***!' And It's A Very Good Question

The media really should be ashamed of themselves for how they've covered this.

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After Yale Law’s Federalist Society invited students to a Choose Your Own Racist Adventure party, students rose up to demand some degree of accountability for the student organization using its recognized status within the school as a pulpit to grace the student body with racist stereotypes. And the school responded by… trying to make it all go away with a mealy mouthed apology.

That’s the actual story here: that confronted with a student group breaching the standards of its charter, the school preferred to play footsie in an effort to avoid irking the powerful judges that plan to swell Yale’s clerkship numbers by running down the FedSoc roster based on who most gallingly “triggered the libs.” I mean, they have to have some standard when the school doesn’t have grades, right?

Nonetheless, most of the media (not Above the Law, mind you) found some way to bend over backward and twist this into the First Amendment controversy that it wasn’t in any conceivable way. Frighteningly, it wasn’t just cynical OAN wannabes lining up to twist a student group responsibility question into a constitutional kerfuffle, with folks who really should know better lodging their hot takes about how it’s the targets of discriminatory conduct who must have it wrong.

Amidst all the softball interviews and tongue-clucking over campus free speech, one student group surveyed the mainstream media scene and asked, “What the actual fuck!” and we’re inclined to agree.

The Washington Free Beacon — an outlet that routinely stumbles into interesting stories and then misses the point like they’re playing competitive dodgeball — posted the statement from the Yale Law Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, available here. One supposes that the Washington Free Beacon intended to show how unprofessional the students were (in contrast to the ones stringing together late-90s racist stereotypes in official invites), but what it actually shows is a group standing in the middle of a surreal landscape where big national outlets are successfully recasting the lived experience of a small school into a narrative of cruel discrimination… against the Federalist Society:

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.

That’s exactly where you locate all the fawning interviews with the FedSoc author about how, golly, the Federalist Society couldn’t possibly have imagined how this could come across as offensive. All gaslighting, all the time.

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But the WTF moment really hits when discussing a Washington Post piece by Ruth Marcus that opened with, “Maoist reeducation camps have nothing on Yale Law School. If you think this is an exaggeration, okay, it is, but keep reading.”

HILARIOUS! Comparing state-sanctioned mass murder to telling elite law students to maybe lay off the racial animus never gets old! Who wouldn’t think this is high comedy? Besides “everyone with a sense of common decency,” the answer is Yale’s APALSA:

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.

We hear you. But that’s because we’re actually lawyers who understand the Bill of Rights. But white people in the media have a vested interest in lecturing that it’s everyone else who needs to toughen up rather than inconvenience their steady flow of jokes about Mao. Because, hey, it’s just a joke.

There is — or should be — a distinction between sophomoric provocation and outright racism.

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And, to be clear, Ruth Marcus is confident that she, and not Black or Asian American Yale students, should be the arbiter of what constitutes the real racism. It’s a self-appointed duty that she takes up with gusto when she asserts that this was exactly the same as the Stanford Law incident where FedSoc kids were offended that they were satirically linked to the coup.

Yep… totally the same… no extra dimension to this at all!

What the actual…

Yale Law School Students to Media: ‘What the Actual F—!’ [Free Beacon]

Earlier: Yale Law Shows Commitment To Diversity With Boilerplate Apology To Minorities

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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