Elite law students want their finals postponed because of grand jury decisions. Not everyone is sympathetic.

Their opening remarks are weak, to say the least.

We have been traumatized over and again by the devaluation of Black and Brown lives. We are falling apart.

Recent events have unsettled our lives as students. We have struggled to compartmentalize our trauma as we sit and make fruitless attempts to focus on exam preparation.

Our trauma will be present with us on exam day, our trauma is inhibiting us from sleeping at night, and our trauma is ever-present among the words in our textbooks. Moreover, the violence that the law has done to Mike Brown and now Eric Garner is a legal violence that affects and implicates us all. We are now asked to use the same legal maneuvers and language on our exams this Monday that was used to deny justice to so many Black and Brown bodies. In being asked to prepare for and take our exams in this moment, we are being asked to perform incredible acts of disassociation that have led us to question our place in this school community and the legal community at large.

We need time to process and breathe. We need your support. We need it now.

We expect the following:

1. 1. 1. That faculty and administration recognize our trauma as legitimate and worthy of a response
      2. That students who have been deeply affected by recent events be allowed to postpone exams
      3. That an emergency event occur on Monday, December 8, 2015 for the administration, faculty, and students to discuss the concerns of students of color in the wake of recent events

Signed,

The Columbia Law School Coalition of Concerned Students of Color

What a bunch of “people of color”, self-centered, privileged, victim wannabes.

Using the Brown and Garner tragedies to get out of taking finals is lame and as the sentiments of resentment flood in, this latest attempt of victimization will further inhibit “people of color” from gaining employment in many of our nation’s law firms; not because they are “people of color” but because of their potential of wanting special treatment based on sympathy and exhibited weakness.

The law is all about precedent and being able to have total recall of precedent.

When the final verdict of the UVA rape incident end in a result female students don’t like, will they be too “traumatized” to take their finals? We could be talking discrimination…? When a gay incident happens, will they be too “traumatized” to take a final? Precedent will have been set.

Let’s be real; most of us wanted a reason to not take a final. We just didn’t think exploiting a national tragedy was the best way to do it. We just studied up and took the fucking exam. These “students of color” are lazy, wanted an excuse to get out of something all other students had to do, and #blacklivesmatter was convenient.

No one will want this crop of lawyers to represent them, and their future whining will not fall on deaf ears.

They’ll be taken as a joke and deservedly so.