The candles were everywhere. That is the first thing I remember—their light flickering on Wheeler Avenue, a few blocks from where I grew up in the South Bronx. I was 14, holding a dry-cleaning ticket for my mother’s dress.

Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, had been shot 41 times by New York City police officers in the vestibule of his apartment building. He had reached for his wallet. They thought it was a gun.

People were saying his name, saying they could not believe he was gone, wondering whether this time would be different. Others answered their own questions: It always ends this way, the cops always get a pass, this is how the system works. And some said nothing at all—just stood staring, or walked past trying to look unbothered, as if violence had become weather in the neighborhood, ordinary as air.

I stood there in that light and felt something shift. I was about to graduate from elementary school as my class valedictorian. I was on my way somewhere. My teachers had told me so. My mother had told me so. I was doing everything right. But that night I understood, without yet having the language, that success did not guarantee safety. The world I was entering had rules not written with me in mind. There were walls I had not built but would still have to face.

I did not yet know that those walls would become the architecture of my vocation. Diallo’s death did more than teach me that policing can be brutal. It taught me that the world was more dangerous for people who looked like me. And somewhere on Wheeler Avenue, without choosing it, I stopped being a child.

My grandmother, whenever she asked about school, had a way of leaning forward, veins rising in her neck and forehead, eager to hear my grades even though she could barely read. She knew an A meant I was going somewhere further than she could go. But when news like this came, she would simply say “bondye” in Creole, speak a silent prayer, then turn to me: “Etienne, don’t go by there. You have to be careful, you know. Stay home. Do your homework.” She said it as if the words could hold the world in place a little longer. Yet even as she spoke, I could see in her face a silent knowing—that homework and staying home were not enough.

Later that night, after I gave my mother her dress—the one she would wear to my graduation—I crumpled the dry-cleaning ticket and let it fall into the trash. But even after it had left my grasp, I still felt the weight of Wheeler Avenue in my hands. And a few months later, even after I had walked through the doors of Regis High School in Manhattan, I still did not understand the tradition I was entering.

It was a tradition, I would soon learn, that would not shield me from the world. Instead, it would ask me to live faithfully in it. What the Jesuits and my teachers gave me in those four years did not determine where I would go, but it kept pressing one question: What is your education for?

What Belonging Costs

Walking into my new school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I felt the distance between where I had come from and where I had arrived. I was a Black kid from the South Bronx, the son of immigrants from the island of Dominica in the West Indies who had crossed their own walls to get here. When I stepped off the subway and entered a school where many had grown up in a different New York than mine, I felt myself on the outside of something. Still, I learned quickly how to behave as if I were not.

Belonging is not the same as being admitted. It’s not that anyone was unkind, but you can be let into a home and still feel like a guest. The wall of belonging is quiet. It shows up in silences, in references you do not catch, in the way a room quietly shows who was meant to stay and who is only passing through.

In my freshman year, I joined the speech and debate team, where my coach handed me a closing argument from the trial of Henry Sweet. In 1925, Sweet, a Black man, moved with his family into a white neighborhood in Detroit. A mob gathered. Shots were fired. A white man was killed, and Sweet was charged with murder for defending his home. Clarence Darrow stood before an all-white jury and argued that Sweet’s first and last defense was the protection of his home and life, and that the case rested on racial prejudice and nothing else.

I practiced that speech until I stopped reciting and began to inhabit it. I understood that Darrow was insisting on something fundamental: A Black man’s right to stand, to defend his home, to belong, was a claim worth fighting for. I did not have the language for it then, but in a way, I too was Henry Sweet—a Black teenager in a space that did not always feel built for me, speaking words that insisted I had a right to be there.

Speech and debate gave me a language to resolve that tension. It taught me that words could do more than persuade. They could expose, unsettle and insist. And in learning to speak, I began to understand that voice is not merely expression but the refusal to disappear. I also learned how easily a voice can feign belonging while the body does not feel it.

That was the first lesson I learned in high school. The wall of belonging is real, but you do not scale it by denying it. You scale it by finding your voice.

And yet, there was a cost. Every room carried evaluation, a standard I could feel even when I could not name it. Somewhere in all that striving, I lost the possibility of rest—the freedom to exist in the halls of academe without being treated like an experiment, without wondering whether my laughter was genuine enough, whether I had truly earned my seat at the Black kids’ table in the lunchroom, whether the room was measuring me even when it pretended not to be.

There is a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” That understanding is still unfolding.

The Plank

Every structure begins with a single plank—the first piece laid down before you discover what the bridge will become. That is how I think about what came after high school.

After high school, I went to M.I.T. to study engineering, not because I loved physics, but because I could not shake a question: Why are some lives so precarious, and what can be built to protect them?

I believed infrastructure might be the answer. It was easier to believe in systems than in people, easier to imagine structure than to encounter suffering without distance. That belief took me to graduate school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, followed by South Africa, where I advised Engineers Without Borders students working on irrigation systems for subsistence farmers.

When I returned to Baltimore—to the same streets I once believed education might carry me beyond—that illusion fell away. The proximity to poverty and injustice demanded not analysis from afar, but presence. It required me to ask not what I could build, but who I was willing to stand beside, and what it would cost me to do so honestly. I understood that what I had carried since Wheeler Avenue was not just grief. It was a calling: What is your education for?

I would not have called it prayer then, but the question returned to me—across cities, across seasons—until I realized it was not just shaping me, but slowly healing something within me. It led me to law school, where I told myself that law and policy could redesign the world. I did not yet understand, however, how deeply law has been used throughout American history to constrain the very communities I hoped to serve.

The Current

I enrolled at Harvard Law School intending to become a public interest lawyer. Instead, by graduation, I had joined a corporate law firm in Washington, D.C. The current inside elite institutions is strong, and I told myself I had been carried to unexpected shores, like so many others. But the truth is that I learned how to stop resisting the current. Resistance would have required me to give up the version of myself that already looked successful.

Six months before my start date, Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Fla. He was 17, walking home from a convenience store with Skittles and iced tea. The protests that followed would become the foundation of the Black Lives Matter movement. I watched their bold placards from a law firm conference room and felt a distance open inside me—not only between the world and me, but between what I said I believed and what I was now able to observe without disturbing my comfort.

It was not just physical distance. It was the dissonance between the privileged world I inhabited and the fragile one crumbling outside those walls, and how easily I was beginning to live inside that separation.

That was the part that frightened me most. Not that I had made a compromise, but that I could learn to live comfortably inside it—that I could build a life that looked successful from the outside while quietly abandoning the question that had once felt unavoidable: What is your education for?

Sitting there, I realized I had answered that question with a lie. I told myself I would give back later and, in the meantime, accept what was offered. After two years, I left. I took a job in fair housing advocacy and, after more circling, eventually found my way into a law school classroom.

What It Is For

Today, I am a law professor. I teach and write about the intersection of law, race, culture and imagination. I sit across from students who remind me of that boy on Wheeler Avenue. I tell them what I wish someone had told me: that the question they are carrying—what is this for?—is not a distraction but the very point of their education. It is, in fact, the most important thing a Jesuit education can give: the formation to ask that question and the courage to live by its honest reply.

I no longer hear that question as something I am meant to answer once and for all. I hear it as something that changes shape as you move through it—first survival, then ambition, then compromise and now responsibility. It is not a question I solve. It is a question I try not to betray.

When I look back at the arc of my life, a single thread runs through it all. I went to M.I.T. to build physical bridges. What I have built instead are bridges between communities and the systems that govern them, between the law as it is and the law as it might be.

I think sometimes about Amadou Diallo’s mother. She was, like my own grandmother, an immigrant—someone who crossed her own walls to get here. I think about what she would make of the life I have built in the years since her son was killed while holding a wallet in front of his home. I do not think she would measure it by the institutions I have attended. I think she would ask what my grandmother would ask: Are you using what you were given? Are you doing it for others? Is your faith larger than your fear?

I hope the answer is yes. I am trying to make it so—for her son, for Trayvon Martin, for Henry Sweet, for all the people who have sat in a room that was not built for them and wondered whether they had the right to stay. A Jesuit education is a gift, but it is not meant to be kept. It insists that the purpose of life is not wealth or status, but the full development of every person, in service to a world that needs it.

Building Bridges Across Walls

That boy on Wheeler Avenue did not know what was being planted in him that night. The grief he felt, the anger he could not name, the question he had no words for yet—all of it was the beginning of a vocation. The beginning of a calling.

Twenty-five years later, I am still angry. I am angry that too few young Black boys will have what I had at Regis. I am angry that they are more likely to be stopped by police than to sit in a classroom like the one I now teach in. I am angry that the work of building a more just world, however imperfect, is being dismantled by those who treat that obligation as negotiable. I will not give up, but I will not pretend, either.

She is still alive somewhere—Amadou Diallo’s mother—still carrying what cannot be carried neatly. I am sitting here turning words into prose, attempting to twist law into a tool that might change the future for people like her son, for her grandchildren, for her. 

Faithfulness is not a feeling. It does not arrive fully formed, nor does it settle the questions that produce it. It is a practice, chosen again and again without certainty. It asks you to remain present when the outcome is unclear, to trust that meaning can live in the refusal to turn away.

The walls are not the end of the story. They are the beginning, where the work begins, where, if you listen closely, you can hear what you are being asked to build. I do not know if we will finish building the bridges we need. But I know what I have been called to do with the time I have left.

That is not peace, exactly. It is something harder. It is faithfulness.

And for now, that is enough.

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at career day at Regis High School in Manhattan.

Etienne C. Toussaint is an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina whose research focuses on the normative foundations of private law.