BLACK EROTIC LAWYERING
-- By
DayoAdeoye - 21 Feb 2025
Dear My Future Client,
You’ve made a mess.
So allow me to make it messier
By submerging my hand in your foreign substance
(With no gloves on)
And massaging it into my fingers.
Talal Asad would say that this is horror
“Matter displaced”
But lucky for you
I am horrible:
Taking matters into my own hands.
On this particular night, you saw red
And chances are you’ve seen red the night before,
And before that
on the street
The day before that
on the evening news
When you were young,
You saw it on your mother’s top lip
And your grandfather's knuckles,
You probably saw it on a schoolhouse wall
From a poster labeled “the human body”
Showing you that your insides are
In fact
Red
Therefore,
Red became your favorite color
By force
By Blood
The color of all your Valentines
But this time
You saw red
And spilled your “first chance” at life
So now you plead with me
to concoct a “second.”
You turn to me, in my lab coat
swishing your trauma in a beaker
And adding a “clear” solution to your troubles
from a dropper labeled “Elements”
You tell me everything you think I should hear
and nothing
But I work with it
condense it into a file
LastName? _FirstName.
You see me typing away,
underlining portions of your nightmare
And in exchange,
I am beholden to two things:
you
And the clock
I am beholden to you because
In your worst moments
I take a magnifying glass to your pupil
Measure the diameter of the dark parts
And see myself
The main difference between us is
I’ve learned to close my eyes
Before the crimson hues take over
I know what happens to a dream deferred
It explodes.
So ultimately,
I close my eyes every time
I decided not to see her lip,
Nor my own
Even when I am covered in scarlet’s fever
Inside and out
I decide to feel nothing
You decide to feel everything
Yet just had nowhere to put it
Until it exploded.
I am beholden to the clock because
That’s the game we must play
(Right?)
The one where you show me all your cards
And I take one
And I keep guessing
Until your pockets run out of paper
And my body runs out of energy
But is miraculously adorned in Joules
Cap it.
All is.
Him.
As a result,
Let me tell you a bit about myself
I am your Juris Dr. Jekyll
I am a risk-averse control freak
Who deep deep down
Knows I will never be Grade A meat
But I am A great cook
I will pour and shake your mess
Turn it into something we can all digest
Transform your horror into “your honor.”
I will not defend you,
But defend the law with you in mind
Particularly the you from the night before,
And when you were young
So allow me to change things up a little bit,
And please excuse the mess
I just want to feel something.
Your experiment is my spirituality
Your mess feels like touching wool
of the lost sheep
And putting the last first
This is not the typical pornography
This is velvet.
The erotic type of velvet,
As Audre Lorde would say
That since touching
And making enough people digest
I can no longer expect
anything less of myself
So my dear client
I am on this mission
To make your honor, holy
“Black Erotic Lawyering”
Black like Oshun
Erotic like red velvet
Lawyering like God
Who sees you
Takes your foreign “stuff”
Transfers it into words
So it may please the court.
INTRODUCTION: The Inseverable Part of the Unimaginable
On his 90th birthday, a journalist asked Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “What is the secret to your success?” He replied, “Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age, I discovered that I was not God.” I find this quote ironic in two ways. First, judges are ostensibly put in the position to “play God” by deciding an individual’s fate. Holmes may have discovered that he was not God, but it did not preclude him from a career where he mimicked God. Secondly, despite being “deeply agnostic,” Holmes’s writing feels proximate to theology. He was, as his biographer Catherine Pierce Wells describes, “an almost religious man…whose deep spiritual impulses resisted articulation.” Though he may have believed he was not God, he viewed himself, and man generally, as a “cosmic ganglion” inseverable from the unimaginable.
On my mission of becoming a successful lawyer, I am interested in what role “God” could have in my success. I am not the “young man” that the Great Dissenter was addressing, but as a Yoruba-American, Black woman, my presence in the legal field embodies Dissent herself–since only 2% of American lawyers are Black women, my existence goes against the majority. Further, my desire to be successful in law takes on a new urgency in light of America’s renewed embrace of fascism and the widespread political rejection of critical race theory and DEI. The contemporary legal landscape is riddled with insecurity. Ideas that were once taken for granted by the law are being undermined by sensibilities who hope to “drain the swamp” but refill it with fracking oil.
My Blackness means that I am a threat to Western sensibilities. My Yoruba-ness means that I am guided by a multitude of divine forces and spiritual traditons, traditions that deify femininity, artistic development, and beauty and do not reject/trivialize/disqualify it. The Yoruba call this force Osun. In the most basic sense, Osun is the goddess of femininity, love, sexuality, and water. Osun is thus an articulation of the unimaginable that I am severed to. As such, what would it mean to advance a lawyer’s theory of success that calls lawyers to be more like God? That is a God like Osun, who can embody erotic feminine power amid a Western patriarchal paradigm. Therefore, by utilizing Audre Lorde’s theory of “erotic power” in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” I argue for aspiring, successful lawyers to be more like the divine feminine rooted in erotic power, which offers a secret to success that stands up against the patriarchal, racist impulses of the contemporary legal landscape.
Legal Uses Of The Erotic
According to Audre Lorde, the erotic is a resource
within each of us “that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” Oppressive forces aim to suppress this type of power, particularly in women, because of the erotic’s ability to facilitate change. Lorde says, “For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect, we can require no less of ourselves.” Once one gets a true taste of the erotic, there is no going back to a status quo that encourages mediocrity and unintentional feelings. The erotic is both a call to action to make work “a conscious decision” and an invitation to celebrate the erotic in all our endeavors where the end is joy. Like all first principles, the lawyer’s task is to make it actionable. Therefore, what I am proposing is Black erotic lawyering.
Rejecting Legal Pornography
The opposite of the erotic is pornography. Pornography is the suppression of true feeling that contributes to a capitalistic impulse to relegate connection to consumption. Lorde is clear that the principal horror of any system is one that defines good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need. Legal pornography is thus a legal practice that suppresses feeling and merits profit. At its worst, the lawyer becomes what Lorde calls an “ascetic.” Ascetism is marked by fear, immobility, and self-abnegation masked as self-discipline. To be clear, erotic lawyering recognizes human needs, including financial ones, yet money is merely a means, not an end.
The first step is to reject the places and spaces that require the suppression of self and incentivize asceticism. This can seem radical, especially in a law school context that is literally and figuratively “buttoned up.” The goal is to find feeling, whether in a private fund or private prison. The litmus test for the “work cultures” she should seek are the ones that won’t require her to self-abnegate.
Knowing Joy
The erotic underlies an open and fearless capacity for joy. Therefore, the charge is simple: do the law that brings you joy. The writing, questioning, connecting, and exegeting that wakes you up in the morning. For example, my erotic mandate propels me toward beauty. I find joy in (1) feeling beautiful, (2) experiencing beauty in all its artistic forms, and (3) theorizing Beauty as a source of political thought. I enjoy writing about how Black Beauty is a new frontier of political formation or how guns act as political cosmetic accessories (
Guns are a Thing of Beauty). I likewise find feeling in my hatred of the American criminal legal system, our modern capitulation of slavery, that feeds on the Black body.
CONCLUSION: Other Food Besides Success
In “The Path of the Law,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. encourages the audience to utilize the more general aspects of law to master one’s calling, connect with the universe, and “catch an echo of the infinite.” In this way, Holmes and Lorde sing a similar song, and I feel called to hum its tune. Perhaps being a lawyer means you are never too far from God. Then the question becomes, which God? What if she’s the god of water, femininity, beauty, and the erotic?
Holmes and Lorde make an interesting pair, that's for sure true, and one of this draft's many virtues is the invitation to set them up together. (It's an unfortunate irony that what Holnes almost certainly meant was that he was taught he was not God by fighting in war.) But regardless of the particular taxonomy of deities one employs. the question whether lawyers are closer to the gods or to the devils remains open. For so long as there are clients, and so long as we consider ourselves bound to their instructions, the line between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn by other hands. That's probably why "client" is the word not uttered here, our asectic commitment to a service that may indeed nullify the freedom and joy of creation, or impose upon us the ethical burden of manipulating those to whom we owe the fullest candor and most complete honesty.
Perhaps this is why, God or not, I return in my teaching to the idea that we should choose our clients and our partners so far as possible, freely, and to structure our education to learn how to make and protect those choices.
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