Leaving aside whether or not "average black law student" is a contradiction in terms or not, or the nuances inherent in such an identity, I puzzled long and hard over this. The answer was certainly not in the rows upon rows of funereally framed photos of the previous generations of legal ghosts lining the walls. Nor, unless my medication had run out, would it be with the past president of the ANC, whose name and portrait adorn the Moot Court (see below).
So where else might a black law student look to find themselves reflected in the law building? Well, if one walks around on level five, to the stairs on the northwest side of the building, one will pass a couple of rather interesting old maps of, I think, shipping routes. One one of these the legend is displayed as if on a banner, held up not by those lions or antelope so popular in heraldry, but by two naked black men.
These "Aethiopians" - beads around wrists and ankles to signify that they are savages, not merely nude gentlemen posing for the artist - stand openly displaying their nakedness without shame or modesty (see "more", below). Civilisation has yet to be presented to them as a gift by the seafaring Europeans whose skill crafted the map. The banner, with which they could more usefully have protected themselves against the mapmaker's gaze (or fashioned into a noose and dispensed with the mapmaker once and for all) is instead held aloft to bear the map's legend.
It would be naive to whitewash the past and the intentions of the mapmaker in adding the illustration of the "Aethiopians", but the uncritical juxtaposition of this image amongst the other images of learned, pale civility in the law building raises the question of whether the assumptions of the mapmaker are not being perpetuated by its placement and its framing.
This, of course, doesn't hold true for students in all disciplines - it's probably a highly unusual Film student who _doesn't_ see themselves as the next Tarantino or Altman or Almodovar, and I shudder to think what we might be breeding in our politics classes...
Modesty would, of course, be an appropriate attitude for these two men to display, given the size of what it is they're so innocently displaying. This illustration clearly predated the myth of the overendowed black man.
Perhaps images of "savagery" are not out of place in a law building, but these "savages" are naked and exposed to the gaze of all who use that staircase, whereas the others, in the rows of photographs, are adorned with the signifiers of civilisation - suits, ties, shiny shoes - and grouped together, far from their "Aethiopian" brethren.