thoughts of SCOTUS and guys dancing in bahags

shared by Angela Makabali, her cousin

As I just completed my first week of law school, I found myself thinking, "It's not a coincidence that I'm in the Bay for school." The exact hows and whys of my decision to become a lawyer is a long and winding story that covers many events over the last seven years, but there is one event to which I keep going back.

2003, my freshman spring, the University of Michigan affirmative action cases were up for oral argument before the Supreme Court (affectionately known to law students as SCOTUS). I was one of 15 students in a freshman seminar with a law professor who has always been one of my mentors and role models for the type of attorney I want to become. In this seminar, I was able to start exploring the relationship between race and the law, and deepen my interest in civil rights. A couple of classmates and I decided to hop on a bus for a 10 hour ride to DC to hear the oral arguments of such an exciting case.

Getting in after midnight, we slept on a grad student's parents' floor in sleeping bags for a couple hours before heading out to SCOTUS, well before sunrise where we camped out some more. As sleep-deprived as we were, I still remember the awe of seeing those pillars at sunrise, directing my gaze to "Equal justice under law," and having a feeling in my gut that I wanted to do this kind of work in my future.

Fast-forward a few hours after passing through the chambers and catching glimpses of Scalia, Ginsburg, et. al., we began our march from the Court to the National Mall for the rally. During the march, a student reporter approached me and asked for the record, "You're Asian. We don't see a lot of you guys here. Affirmative action hurts you guys, so why are you here?" Taken aback, I sputtered, "Um, because it's the morally right thing to do," which he noted and walked off.

I didn't have a coherent argument, and this really bothered me at the time, and my first thought was to call Cyn. While we saw each other when in the same city, we both had crazy schedules, so we didn't chat by phone often. Something prompted me to call her though. So I called her and asked, "What are the policy reasons for why we support affirmative action again?" After she patiently explained to me the complexities of the Asian American population and institutional racism, we got off the phone. That was the last time we spoke. It was the morning of April 1, 2003.

While she was at UCLA, Cyn's presence throughout the formative years of my life as a high school student significantly shaped my interest in Asian American and Filipino American activism, which came to be a big part of my life in college. From the cultural (taking me to PCNs to see guys dance in bahag--holla!) to the political (I have her copies of the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Ron Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore) to the personal politics of activist circles (Cyn's mastery of bringing consensus and seeing the bigger picture above the drama), the ways in which she guided and continues to guide me are always present. The awareness of race and politics that she cultivated in me was part of the reason why I sought out that freshman seminar on race and the law, out of which my desire to become a lawyer grew, and, as I start my second week as a 1L at Berkeley Law, I can only think how fitting it is that I've come to the Bay--where I am near my family, and near Cyn.