I got rejected from my top choice law school today. Sitting in class listening to some FBI agent drone on about the differences between Title 10 and Title 59 authorities for the military or some shit, then the email hit my inbox. “We regret to inform you that we cannot take positive action on your application.” What a weird way to say that I am too dumb to go to your school. Anyways, there’s this forum on Reddit where people post about their law school results and ask questions that I read pretty frequently but never post on, but for some reason I had the urge to post that I had been rejected. I made my post and it had all the stuff people normally put. The school, their stats, and then notably their status as an “underrepresented minority” or lack thereof. 

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I put the demarcation that I am one of these URM’s and hit post. Immediately the first comment comes in, “are you Mexican?” Not that they were sorry to hear a part of my soul had just been crushed by this rejection or that they wished me well wherever I end up. Nope, they wanted to know if I was Mexican. I replied yes. “Oh well, that school is tough for Mexicans cause they have a lot of them. Maybe you would have had better luck if you were black.” That comment made me want to die. This whole thing about talking about my ethnicity made me want to die. Who the fuck cares? And it was a part of a broader trend, one that I had dumped myself into by including those three letters, URM, on my post. Whenever anyone posted that they had been accepted to a school with an LSAT score or GPA that was even slightly below the average people instantly ask “URM?” They might as well be telling this person who is celebrating that the only reason they got in is because their parents aren’t white. 

 

This whole concept of a URM advantage at first made me feel icky. Like should I go back to what I did in my white private high school in Texas and just hide that I’m Mexican so that it’s all easier. So people won’t take my accomplishments, or even failures in this case, and attribute them to the fact my mom was born in Mexico and my first language was Spanish and that I know how to spice my foods? FUCK THAT. If these schools want me because they need a Mexican, I’m happy to oblige and if anyone there wants to look down on me for it then they can choke.