In the hierarchy of client cooperation, Tyler* sat comfortably at the bottom. He never arrived on time for meetings, and he rarely paid attention to important details. A trying client but an easygoing 19 year old, Tyler often failed to take his impending trial seriously. Rather than walking into pre-trial meetings concerned about his future, Tyler entered with an aura of impunity, as though the words “not guilty” had already been pronounced and his trial had already been won. His sincerity shone through each time he arrived 20 minutes late — four feet, 11 inches of youthful innocence and nonchalant confidence.
I assured him that attempted armed robbery was no small matter; in return, he assured me of his innocence. After nearly three months as an investigator with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, I had learned that — whether convicted or released, whether first-timers or repeat offenders — most clients were not innocent. However, Tyler seemed different. I would never ask, but he would always tell. As I chose his dress shirts in the children’s department of J.C. Penney, he reminded me that he didn’t do it. As I helped him try on a black suit in the dressing room, he reminded me that he didn’t do it. As I paid for his five days’ worth of trial clothes, he reminded me that he didn’t do it. After having spent weeks conducting investigative work, tracking down other potential suspects, and scrutinizing every second of police body camera footage, I believed him.
Nine days after our shopping excursion, we sat in a D.C. Superior Courtroom, awaiting Tyler’s verdict. After five grueling days in trial, I was ready to congratulate Tyler on his rightful acquittal and to shake his attorney’s hand for a job well-done, solidifying our fourth case victory in as many weeks. I fully planned to celebrate our win with a well-deserved, weekend-long nap.
We did not celebrate that Friday. We did not celebrate that weekend. And for the next 15 years, Tyler will not be celebrating.
Like many of my peers, I arrived at Harvard with a fairly clear career path in mind. Whether or not I really wanted to follow that path remained an open question at the time. All I knew was that money and prestige mattered in the world, so I sought both without hesitation. Harvard did little to avert my gaze. In fact, it seemed like the heavenly gates of prosperity swung open with every drop of the “H-bomb,” like the whole university exerted its nominal might to place its students in seats of privilege, to distance them from the problems of the world around them.
But proximity to suffering has a strange impact on a person. I myself am not in prison. My life has not been upended by a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, and it likely never will be. Yet the pain of becoming proximate to that system, of viewing that suffering firsthand, leaves its mark where no one else can see it. It lingers and festers in every thought. It depresses and distorts every moment. Then, one day, enough time has passed, and those thoughts start to fade. The demands of life pull us elsewhere to concern ourselves with problem sets and papers, with meetings and meals, with all the non-trivial trivialities of our own lives. Over time, this aggregated distance opiates the pain, but it also atrophies the empathy. In such cases, the old idiom takes on a different meaning: absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder, but that fondness takes the form of contentment with our own situations — a comfort that the indigent, the downtrodden, and the suffering struggle to know.
Harvard’s campus breeds this contentment in every graduating class. Though talk of social justice rings in the air across campus, though many clubs and classes dedicate themselves to the study of inequality and injustice, such academic awareness fails to shine through in the career choices of its graduates. Rather than change the world, we become a part of it. Rather than move toward those in need, we double the distance. Rather than fight to ensure that people like Tyler can enjoy their lives with the justice they rightfully deserve, we feel the immediate demands of our own lives pulling us too strongly in the opposite direction. Although there is no shame in finding fulfillment in a vocation beyond that of activism and social justice, it seems clear that we Harvard students — abetted by the university itself — too readily capitulate before the privilege of institutional prestige at the very moment our culture of social action has the chance to move beyond these ivy gates.
When Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Institute, spoke at the Institute of Politics last December, he noted as much. He challenged an audience of Harvard students and freshman Congresspersons to invert this trend, to be willing to do the uncomfortable, to help the poor and the suffering; for as he writes in Just Mercy, “Hiding them from sight only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too.”
So long as we, the progeny of Harvard, fail to practice this ethos of justice in the real world, our preaching of those values will be of little more consequence than Tyler’s declarations of innocence. So long as we maintain our distance, we will never earn the right to celebrate.
* Name has been changed for confidentiality.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Samuel Zeller