Hear us is through violence.”
sation among the fellows (excitedly sharing rumors, for instance, that tear-gas canisters used in Ferguson are the same as those used on the Palestinians in the West Bank), and they used the word apartheid to describe the conditions they saw there and at home. Rahman was “very vocal,” one person says; at home, she was already studying discrimination by the NYPD in Arab and South Asian communities. She marched in Haifa in July with Palestinians against Israeli forces, and, upon returning home, wrote an essay decrying Israeli-military violence. “IDF soldiers provoke violence using tear gas, stun grenades, rubber-coated steel bullets, and often, live ammunition at civilians exercising their free speech,” she wrote.
For many of the young law students, the trip was galvanizing. “We were about to graduate, to become American lawyers, and the question was: How were we going to pursue this, involve the struggle in our work?” says Jordan Manalastas, who was in the program and is now a public defender for detained immigrants.
Mattis was also marching that fall. His roommate at St. Andrew’s boarding school, still a close friend, was Ikenna Iheoma, who was working at NBC Sports in 2014. Iheoma remembers, especially after Garner’s killing, feeling the responsibility as a Black man to stand up for other Black men and seeing that somehow popular opinion in the U.S. was still not united behind the victims of police violence. “It was fifty-fifty,” he says. One night, Mattis gathered a bunch of law students to march, and Iheoma came downtown. “I obviously joined in. It was a time when there were protests everywhere. The NYU law students went outside and held up signs and started marching, and as we were walking along and demonstrating, more and more people joined.” Most of the protesters were Black or people of color—as if the rest of the world weren’t ready or able to digest what it meant to watch a human die on video at the hands of police. “We were like, Okay, this is really bad,” he says. “We were 25, 26, at the time.” The late Obama years were studded with protests like these: A younger, more dissatisfied generation was rising up.
Iheoma was speaking to Mattis on the phone the Thursday before his arrest. Iheoma lives in Harlem, and they were talking about getting their dogs together in some park midway between them. (Mattis has a goldendoodle named Lorde Hampton.) They were marveling, as they had been for days, about how different it was now with so many people out in the streets—so many white people. The demands for police reform and accountability were no longer fifty-fifty but a scream in unison, and the friends were wondering, in this altered reality, about their role. They were full adults now: a corporate lawyer and a health-tech entrepreneur. Mattis had not told Iheoma that, because of the pandemic, he had recently been furloughed. “Should we be on the front lines? Should we be using money to donate more? Are there other things we can do this time that we weren’t able to do last time? Should we take a step back and let the younger people of color take the forefront, like we did six years ago?”
There’s a certain kind of Muslim kid who grew up in New York after 9/11 extremely aware of how it feels to have the world suddenly suspect you as the enemy. Richard Lubell watched a lot of these kids pass through his classroom at Brooklyn Tech. In 2006, when Rahman was a junior, she took his civics-and-law class, he said in an interview. He observed that—whereas previous generations might have stuck more closely to the straight and narrow, believing that if they worked hard, the world would reward them—Rahman’s cohort of kids was more “free-form, adventurous, bohemian, some version of that,” he said. “Somehow, the rules about success were tarnished, and they had to go out there and make their own rules, make meaning themselves. The world had become a more insecure place, more foreboding, and these kids were searching for a way to find meaning, whether you became a filmmaker or a world traveler or an activist lawyer. I may even have said that in class—that it was good to become an activist lawyer.” Rahman told Rizvi that it was Lubell who had inspired her to become an attorney.
Lubell himself, who retired from teaching three years ago, is a leftist, a self-proclaimed “third-party activist—maybe less identified with the Democratic Party per se,” and in his civics-and-law class, he held mock elections “that were parliamentary. It wasn’t a winner-take-all kind of thing. We practiced ranked voting, a way of distributing power,” he remembered. Class discussions were based on the law around actual news events, which, in the years after 9/11, included due process, equal protection, and search and seizure. Many teenagers in the school at the time were regularly stopped by police when entering the subway and told to hand over their backpacks for inspection. Lubell said that, in class, Rahman was “always a tough girl, kind of feisty and tough, and always fighting for the underdog.”
“She calls herself a cat,” says one of her friends. “She takes on this cat persona; she says she can talk to cats, like a cat whisperer. She’ll say, ‘I’m just going to be a cat and sit here.’” All the friends mention, unprompted, her stringent environmentalism, how she would chide them for buying plastic bottles of water at the deli or for using disposable grocery bags. One recalled a time
(Continued on page 73)