I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

And welcome to another episode of the Aquarius Helos podcast today.

So this introduction is a little bit different because my executive producer

also known as my best friend

Jared Loho said that this is the smartest man he's ever met in his life.

I honestly that's kind of a low bar but we're just go with today. But we have none other than from the

University of New Mexico School of Law, Vene Harperlani. How you feeling to Dave Vene?

Good, good. Thank you for having me. And I'm glad you here we got a lot of stuff to talk about and

Gerrit was extremely clear. He said, if you just shut up and listen to the professor, you

will learn a lot and so that's what you. But we start each one of our

shows the same way by having our guests walk us through the arc of their careers and you've spent much of your

career in legal academia. Talk to talk about the factors that led you to make the decision to teach law and talk about why you've chosen constitutional law and the intersection of race and law is your calling in the law. So this really goes back to my

childhood. I grew up in Newcastle County, Delaware, a child of Asian Indian

immigrants. I'm South Asian American.

One of very few people in my background in Newcastle County, Delaware.

But what else was happening at that time was we had desegregation, school desegregation, busing. I was part of the most comprehensive busing plan in the country where black and white children are schools were mandated to be 70% white 30% black that was the demographics so that really

affected me growing up and it's not something we talked about you know we didn't talk about the

racial dynamics that we were growing up around but that's what I grew up with went to school with I was a pre-med

undergrad when I went to the University of Delaware but all these things about race and

racial inequity were in the back of my mind, you know, and we didn't talk about them, but eventually, you know, I discovered this is really what I'm into what I'm interested in, you know, I want to make a difference on this issue. That took me to graduate school first and I started reading the work of

the late Professor Derek Bell who worked on critical waste theory very well known first tenured

...