About Face

I started my work in activism at more of the macro level. I went to law school and studied international human rights at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. this where George Floyd was murdered and sort of the starting point of the protests against police brutality in the U.S. When I was there I was working for the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of prison inmates. One of my jobs was to read the letters from the inmates, to decide if they had a claim. Now I can tell you what I was doing was listening, to stories, to emotions, to pain and loss. I was all in.   The problem was that I was acting like a lawyer, And a lawyer’s job, is not about stories, or empathy, or emotions or heart. A lawyers job is to decide whether these facts square with the law. I would normally take these letters and put them in a pile that said, “NO CASE.” What that meant was that whatever personal experiences and injustices were at the heart of these inmate letters, they were not meaningful enough to make a mark on the