My latest essay in the Harvard Law Record is in response to a recent campus incident that has become all too common on campuses across the country: boiled over tension between racial justice advocates and their critics citing free speech concerns. I try to parse through the debate in an attempt to find steps forward for building a moral community on campus:

The first editorial published in the Harvard Law Record this year was entitled “We Owe Each Other a Moral Community.”  This project — of doing the hard work of turning spaces into places, strangers into neighbors, and a professional training ground into a moral community — has seen better weeks than this one.  It is strange to see warring groups of our neighbors communicate via the symbolic tit-for-tat of postering, ripping, and re-postering.  It is disturbing to see one of our neighbors videotaping another one so as to provide clickbait for his political tribe’s media outlets. The events of the last two days may have created new heroes and villains, may have scored a few points for a few folks within their respective filter bubbles, and may have made most of us — and the distant readers reading about us — angry.  But what these events did not do was build understanding.  This is a shame, because if we are to build a moral community together, we must work to understand each other.

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Any attempt to understand this controversy must begin with taking seriously the enduring civic plague at the center of it: racial disparity in America.  The problem has been articulated multiple times by Reclaim Harvard Law, but it is always worth restating. Four in ten black children in our country live in poverty. The 2011 median white household had $111,146 in wealth holdings, while the median black household had $7,133.  Among Fortune 500 CEOs,only five are black, while 75 corporations in the S&P 500 have not a single black director. The NFL, NBA, and MLB have 92 teams, of which only one is principally owned by a black man.  While only 1.4% of the top 1% of households by income are black, 40% of incarcerated Americans and 35% of death row inmates are black. This racial disparity is a national emergency to which our generation must urgently respond.

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However, if we dismiss the vocal critics of Reclaim Harvard Law as (at best) priggish or (at middle) provocateurs or (at worst) racist, we miss the chance to understand an issue of importance to a small group of culturally conservative Harvard students. There is a dominant cultural and economic ideology at Harvard: corporate liberalism.  Most Harvard Law students are secular liberals on cultural issues and corporate-minded technocrats on economic issues. Put another way, they are skeptical of moral language and groups (with the exception of rhetoric around individual rights and tolerance), but faithful to the powerful, centralized institutions — be they powerful law firms, corporations, universities, media outlets or government entities — that most of them populate after graduation.  Meanwhile, half of American believe the opposite: almost half of American women are pro-life; about half of Americans say grace before meals; Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life is the best selling hardcover book in American history; and trust in national institutions is at an all-time low. The silence around this disparity is a source of consternation among our campus’ few cultural conservatives.

Read the full essay — The Moral Community in the Wake of Postergate — here at the Harvard Law Record.