Jauregui 1

Cinthya Jauregui

CTW 1

Professor Lasley

29 October 2018

Robillarian Mercy

Critical writing professors. Do they become professors because they like writing, or

because they like reading, since most of their time would be spent ​reading​ the work of their

struggling students as they learn to write? It’s certainly ironic that in order to write better, you

must read or to know how to read better, you must write. One does not have to cancel or

minimize the priority of the other, but our human instinct of seeking patterns and categorizing

has driven our society to a corner of choosing only one side of a story to tell, when the answer is

not A or B or C, but D. All of the above, depending on the way you choose to say such story.

Perspective changes the way we define a story. From a bad event to a new learning

experience, memories drift from “what has happened… to what happens to what may happen”

(Robillard 81). Amy E. Robillard’s “It’s Time For Class: Toward a More Complex Pedagogy of

Narrative” reveals precisely how interpretations of a person’s past shapes the way they regard

their present and future. If we were to take Robillard’s approach to the concepts of trust,

narrative, and time as a new way to dissect Bryan Stevenson’s ​Just Mercy: A Story of Justice

and Redemption​, we would be able to analyze it with a new lens. Suddenly, Bryan’s memoirs

and those of the prisoners he encounters and seeks to defend transcend an autobiography and

become the accounts of a humanity that as a whole is fragile, tormented, and broken.
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Bryan Stevenson begins his book in a pragmatic discipline of defining his ethics a lawyer

when dealing with prospective clients. One of them being ​“ to accept what clients tell [him] until

the facts suggest something else.” (Stevenson).’This conditional assumption of temporal trust

that Stevenson gives to his clients illustrated how trust is based on the way a person has been

raised or the context in which they see themselves to be- what Robillard argued. Robillard

mentions how as a working class student, trusting narrative and closure were embedded into her

instinctively, but “as a writing teacher, [she has] learned to distrust the very way of writing that

is most comfortable for working class students” (Robillard 90). In this way, what Robillard trusts

is defined by the identity she chooses to adhere to for a certain aspect of her life. Similarly, in

choosing to become a lawyer, Stevenson is able to inadvertently trust his clients automatically as

the law he relies on for his career compels him to treat them “innocent until proven guilty” even

when the police themselves do not practice such values.

Currently on the news, we see the continuation of police brutality on innocent colored

youth. Policemen are more brutal on colored minorities because statistically, they are thought to

be more likely to be harmful. On the other hand, the youth of this minorities are inherently taught

to distrust and fear the police because of the many scenarios where innocent teenagers such as

themselves were wrongly killed or convicted. The statistics Stevenson reveals were concerning

​ his
with “black men eight times more likely to be killed by the police than whites”.​ T

imminently provokes more tension in the youth to become potential victims when encountered

by law. Policemen tragically mislabel this anxiety as a sign of culpability and thus distrust the

teenagerst themselves. They try to hold a dominant composure and act more brashly. People end

up running. People end up shot, which only exacerbates the cycle of distrust among the races and
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law enforcements Stevenson laments as he recalls the experience of police trying to incriminate

him outside his own apartment.

Stevenson’s own encounter with the police abusing their power to discriminately breach

his rights of privacy is another example of the correlation of trust and background. Stevenson

himself retrospectively admits that the only reason he knows to stay calm and trust in his own

innocence to diffuse the tension when being unjustly profiled by police officers is his knowledge

on the judicial system as a lawyer. He laments that had he found himself in the same hostile

situation of trying to be incriminated a few years prior, he could have ended up shot like any

other innocent black youngsters that do not know not to run at the sight of policemen. It is quite

sad and pathetic to realize this common tragedy is fueled by a vicious cycle of distrust in which

minority youth pay the highest price. In the words of Bryan Stevenson:

“Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty,

and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted

without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice”

Only when we realize why we trust or distrust the things we do and are able to discuss it

with others, can we change this gruesome past of victimization. Until then, we are stuck in a

corrupted system of distrust and prejudice in which the only relief comes from the way we tell

our story for the dignity of our identity.

Robillard reveres the power of narrative to define one’s identity because she finds that

we “rely on their past experiences to understand new knowledge.” and it's the way we construct

the “stories we tell ourselves [that] betray the way we want to be seen and understood” (83).

This construction of our persona by the way we formulate our past is seen in the book when
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Stevenson meets an old man who strongly affirms the marks on his face “aren’t [his] scars, cuts,

and bruises. [They] are [his] medals of honor.” Whereas Stevenson initially felt sympathy

towards the old man weakly slouching on the wheelchair, in this phrase, he realizes that though

society would pity him for his condition, the old man is proud of the way he go there. It was the

bravery in fighting for what was right that got him so beat up, so it is with heroic pride his

condition authoritatively demands recognition. Often times our limited assumptions create a

different narrative from the one the person lives.

This contrasting assumptions of the same event is also seen through the kindness

portrayed by the ones society would least expect it from: murderers. One of Stevenson’s client

was Walter McMillian, an innocent man that was unjustly accused and convicted with the death

penalty. While justice and the rest of society turned an eye blind to the way he was imprisoned

“around all these murderers, yet it felt like sometimes they were the only ones trying to help

[him]”. Prisoners are stigmatized as inherently bad people not good people that made bad

choices. The criminalization of their actions suddenly extrapolates to a criminalization of their

unredeemable character. Because they took the life of another person, society shuns them

without wanting to know the motivations or circumstances that would have let them to such

desperate extreme if killing. Even if the death of another is inexcusable, Stevenson says ““It’s

just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from”. If we were to be

able to reconcile the past of others without meaninglessly categorizing people. Labels become

dehumanizing to a person’s story as Robillard herself found how destructive it was for working

class students . She sadly reflects on how “We ask our students to look to their futures rather

than to their pasts”, and in authoritatively enforcing the way they learn, they are stolen of the
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opportunity “to create their own meanings from their own histories” (76). People simply won’t

be understood if they do not interpret how their past shaped them, and people will not be able to

show compassion for others if they refuse to accept that a person cannot be blamed for a past that

was beyond their control. Stripped away from any other possessions when imprisoned for life

and even their own identity, the social construct of time becomes the only thing left that they can

claim as their own.

In the book, a desperate death row prisoner pleaded Stevenson that he“ But I have

twenty-nine days left, and I don’t think I can make it if there is no hope at all. Just say you’ll do

something and let me have some hope”. It is in this insistence for hope through which the

importance of time and its effects on inmates can be most clearly seen. This ownership of their

time left until they are executed is similar to how Robinson’s mother would obsess over time

because she felt that was the only thing in her life she could control. In this way, when the death

row inmates realize the fleeing nature of time as an execution date is released, the fear of losing

time settles in. They are aware of their imminent doom, but realizing their inability to do

anything about it but wait slowly taunts their sanity. This is why they are fixated in the passing

of the days, having 30… 29… 28 days of life left. The days act as a countdown of wasted time

not doing anything. To have even the comfort of knowing a lawyer is helping them would give

them the dignity of assurance that they fought until the end. This dying peace of mind is the only

hope they have left when they know anything else is futile.

In the end, we as humans only trust what we known. What we know is shaped and crafted

from our past. Our past is defined by the way we choose to interpret it in correlation to our

present and future. It is the passage of time that unites our stories and self beings. A social
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construct that we have created for ourselves is what now makes us hyper aware of the fact there

will come a day when we will not have any more time left. Our fear of death is testament to the

fact we are living. There could not be one without the other, just like because we fear, it’s that

we have hope. Hope in a better future transcends our current woes and our hurtful pasts. Like

Stevenson highlights, we are all broken, “but our brokenness is also the source of our common

humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing.” Our common

yearning to tell our story and be heard is what “sustains our capacity for compassion” because

we all seek belonging with one another. There are no ultimate distinctions or races when we

realize we all belong to the human race. When we realize that it is our differences in the way we

live and are that give us dignity, we will stop alienating each other. This new lens with which to

see our world is the Robillarian type of mercy Robillard and Stevenson would want us to see the

world around us..

As for the professors, a preference for either discipline of reading and writing does not

make a difference because one could not exist without the other. Reading could not exist without

a text to be read and a text has no value if it is not read.

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Works Cited

Robillard, Amy. “​It’s Time For Class: Toward a More Complex Pedagogy of Narrative”.

College English, Vol. 66, No. 1, The Personal in Academic Writing,​ 74-92. National Council of

Teachers of English Stable. September, 2003.

Stevenson, Bryan. ​Just Mercy a Story of Justice and Redemption​. Scribe, 2016.