The LSATExam

I assumed I had arrived early for the Law School Aptitude Test. As I entered the testing facility, I looked up and across the large classroom to find the place nearly filled with young white faces before me. It seemed to me, in the moment as I stood before them, as if there were hundreds of them, and most were staring back at me with wide-eyed anticipation. Their young white faces resembled fresh eggs seated in a carton, row after row, perfect white shells, unblemished, each with individual human emotions displayed upon their shell-like faces as if drawn by a characterartist.

As I gazed about the room for an empty seat, I imagined that their young minds were teetering on the brink of the great fall from the wall of life—just like that eggshell-shaped Dumpty character did in that nursery rhyme when he ventured too close to the edge and fell from the wall and broke into pieces. Their minds, in my mind, were something that once broken could never be repaired or made operativeagain.

I imagined that these white kids were poised on the edge of reality, unaware of the sudden stop that awaited them after the fall off the wall at the bottom…Especially after having been protected from birth by their white privilege from the harshness of life that most black kids discover way too soon in this America. They knew not what to expect from this moment and probably didn’t have to give a damn, as this was their world I was trying to enter and not them attempting to entermine.

Yet here theysit…

Mostly in silence, puppets of their fates, and they didn’t knowit.

Damn! I thought to myself as I stared out amongst them, not seeing or focusing on any one face in particular. Their young faces looked the same tome.

These guys don’t have a clue, dothey?

What thehellare all of you doinghere?

Don’t you guys read newspapers—in particular the employmentsection?

There may not have been thirty-five or forty people in the room. Although, it seemed like more than a few hundred. Hell, there may as well have been a few hundred people here in relation to the available jobs being advertised for attorneys. Unless they knew something I didn’t as it pertained to the profession. Which is quite possible since it’s a White’s game—American Jurisprudence. I’m just another black trying to get into the game, i.e. play on thefield.

My thoughts must have been projected on my face as my eyes scanned about the room because I perceived changes in facial expression on more than a few faces as they seemed suspiciously to mirror what I had been thinking. In my mind’s eye, I could read what I saw in their faces as if a newspaper headline had flashed before me:“Another one…Another slot to the Affirmative Actionrecipients.”

Never mind that there are only a few other blacks—all females ironically—sprinkled about this room full of white kids like a stingy amount of chocolate chips over a generous mound of vanilla ice cream. No unfair competition in that though… I guess the fact that ninety percent of affirmative action recipients arewhite women didn’t matter to these kids. They’ve already bought into the hype, the BS the politicians fed to their parents, targeting “A