The tone of Erika Wilson’s class feels almost subversive. In an era of soundbite judgment and social media vitriol, her law students are positively Victorian in their restraint. They speak cautiously, in whole paragraphs, adding generous caveats and concessions. They decline to take offense. They do not shout or interrupt. They listen.
If cable news has an antonym, this is it.
Their practiced civility serves a purpose. These students have volunteered to spend a semester tackling one of the most fraught issues in American public life: race and the law.
“They’re going to be the ones who make things better or not,” Professor Wilson said. “So we will have a respectful dialogue, even when they disagree with one another. That’s our job as educators — to find a way to facilitate those hard conversations.”
Erika Wilson has spent her career having discussions like this, figuring out how to address tense questions with open-handed honesty. As an assistant professor at the UNC School of Law, she divides her time between teaching, research, and a very active practice at the school’s Civil Clinic. At any given moment, she may have multiple clients working with her students on employment or housing discrimination cases, lending real-life urgency to the issues covered in her class.
On this Monday morning early in the semester, she is guiding her students through some of the ugliest pieces of American legal history. She lets long silences hang in the air as students try to parse statutory definitions of race, and explain how they’ve evolved over time.
She often asks students to reflect on their personal experiences or make predictions about the future. It’s a way of getting them to ease into tough subjects, to lay their cards on the table and build trust with their classmates.
It takes patience, but it works. From a corner of the cramped seminar room, a white student says that her small-town high school taught the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, emphasizing state’s rights and southern grievances. A black classmate nods with real interest, making eye contact to encourage the memory.
“What did you take away from that?” Wilson asks.
The student thinks for a moment. “It really does matter what you learn, or don’t learn, about this kind of history,” she says. “That’s why I’m here.”
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That’s exactly why Wilson is here, too. As a first-generation college student, the daughter of parents born into the segregated south, and now a professor and civil litigator, she has seen firsthand how the weight of history bears on the present.
Part of her determination to go to college, she recalled, came from watching her mother and father struggle against entrenched barriers. “I remember the frustrations my parents felt,” Wilson said. “Race was really a central factor in determining where they could go and what opportunities were available to them.”
They pushed Wilson and her siblings to go further, to excel in school so that a college education might open doors.
Wilson studied the University of Southern California, in part because their football team won the Rose Bowl when she was a senior in high school. “I used to watch college football and basketball with my Dad every weekend, and we would look at the different schools that were playing,” she remembered. “I picked most of the schools I applied to based on how good their team was that year.”
She became a public policy major because it offered the chance to read and learn across a wide range of disciplines — political science, sociology, history, media. It helped frame the broader forces that Wilson saw at work in the lives of her parents, her siblings, and her classmates. An internship in the Washington, DC public defender’s office convinced her that law was the most promising route to make a difference.
And even now, that’s the metric Wilson uses to measure her days and divide her time. “What impact can I have? What opportunity do I have to offer an important perspective on something that matters?”
Should she focus on legal scholarship that might influence colleagues in the academy? Or spend time preparing a speech on school equity to an audience of teachers? Or make time to counsel the struggling student who showed up at her office door?
“There’s this stereotype that professors don’t…” — Wilson takes a lawyerly pause — “… that professors don’t work very hard, to put it bluntly. I work seven days a week. Every single day. I literally work every single day.”
It’s not a boast, but a flat statement of need — a measure of how much work remains to be done untangling the long legacy of legal discrimination.
“I think people of all political stripes could take my class and come away with a more complicated view. ”
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For Wilson, that work has to begin with an honest look at how the law has been both used and misused. She isn’t aiming for consensus in the classroom, but she does insist that students look hard at their own assumptions. “I think people of all political stripes could take my class and come away with a more complicated view. ”
It’s been several years since UNC Law offered a full course on the legal history of race in America, and Wilson felt it was overdue. “At this moment, given where we’re at politically, it’s almost irresponsible not to have this kind of class available for students to grapple with these questions,” she said. “We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend we’re on the right path, but I think recent events have shown that we’re not. On the left and the right, I think there’s consensus that we still have a problem.”
By the end of that Monday morning session, careful reticence has evolved into a fascinating debate on the permanence or fluidity of racial categories. Is racial thinking an ingrained human instinct, or something that’s been socially conditioned? Can we get rid of racial identity? Do we want to get rid of racial identity? How would you go about it?
The students can’t agree. They’re asking one another questions, venturing contradictory opinions, making reference to the readings and drawing on stories from their own lives.
Wilson isn’t offering answers, but she looks pleased. “Alright,” she says as the class draws to a close. “What’s next? Where do we go from here?”
It’s her students, she knows, who will have to decide. ◆
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Originally published in The Carolina Alumni Review, the alumni magazine of UNC Chapel Hill.
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