Mari Matsuda and Chuck Lawrence, A Love Story

As pioneering developers of critical race theory, the two lawyers and activists deftly navigate love and community while defending equality and justice for all.

Images by Michelle Mishina

On a drizzly afternoon in late May, Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence III greeted me on their enclosed lānai, which sits in the shade of a hulking olive tree fronting their Mānoa home. Warm and spry, they served an iced tea steeped with mint from Matsuda’s garden and a fresh loaf of sourdough baked by Lawrence, who friends know as Chuck. Their white American bulldog, a rescue named Aki, nuzzled my leg as construction workers pushed a wheelbarrow past us down a pathway lined by statues of the Buddha, the birdsong punctuated by the crank of an electric saw. The recently retired couple was in the process of repairing their cottage, with the hopes of converting it into Matsuda’s art studio, and things that would eventually get stored there were stacked around us in boxes on the lānai — stray instrument parts, an assortment of art supplies, and as Matsuda puts it, “books, books, books, books, books.” 

Despite the familiarity of this tableau, Matsuda and Lawrence are not your typical kūpuna transitioning into retirement, a fact that made itself apparent within the first five minutes of our interview. For starters, when I told them a mutual friend heard their house was on the FBI watchlist, Matsuda let out a sharp laugh. “Is it? I mean I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, her voice calm but resolute. “We had dinner last night with Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is a leading critical race theorist, and she has to travel with a bodyguard.” 

Mari Matsuda and Chuck Lawrence are progressive activists, scholars, and former law professors who have been married for 32 years.

The couple are themselves pioneering developers of critical race theory, which in the 1980s introduced the concept of race as a political construct baked into the historical and contemporary formation of American law. But ever since conservatives began framing critical race theory as a threat to students, transforming the once niche academic field into a Fox News talking point, they’ve had to remove their contact information from the University of Hawai‘i website. “We would get hate mail,” said Matsuda, who made history as the first tenured female Asian American law professor, during her stint at UCLA in the nineties. “It would come in an envelope with no return address. That’s the giveaway. But now it is not just email. People will show up on your doorstep, so we are much more cautious about who we’ll talk to than we were before.”

Matsuda, 68, and Lawrence, 81, are progressive activists, scholars and former law professors who have been married for 32 years. Since retiring from the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law — Lawrence in 2021, Matsuda in 2022 — they’ve regularly received requests from journalists from media outlets like The New York Times, asking to lend their venerated legal voices to pressing issues in America’s latest culture wars. In the ’90s, they co-authored two books, We Won’t Go Back and Words That Wound, which made legal cases in support of affirmative action and free speech on college campuses, both hot button issues that have cycled back, decades later, as front page news. “Most significantly, none of the problems we were trying to solve got solved,” Matsuda said. “And we literally wrote the book about it, so everyone is calling us.”

However, unlike most journalists, I didn’t come here to discuss their legal opinions on the student protests over Israel’s assault on Gaza unfolding at UCLA or the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. I came here, instead, to talk to the couple about love — how it functions as the bedrock of their relationship, their engagement with various communities in Hawai’i, and their lives since retiring. 

Not that they see much distinction between politics and their lives. “All of our friendships, our personal lives, have been colored by the work,” said Lawrence, who wore a black T-shirt printed with a green and red image of the Black power fist, from an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. “Really, the work isn’t separate from the life.”

So what does retirement look like for people who’ve devoted their long and esteemed careers to advocating for social justice?

More relaxing, in some regards. In lieu of Lawrence’s least favorite parts about working in academia, like grading exams and attending faculty meetings, he takes Aki on daily five-mile walks through the neighborhood. It’s his chance to listen to audiobooks of mostly fiction, revisiting everything from classics, like Beloved and Anna Karenina, to buzzy contemporary novels like Bryan Washington’s Family Meal. A former jock, he also plays tennis twice a week with “two groups of old guys who are all younger than me,” he said, laughing. “It’s the one time where all the rest of the shit goes out of my head, because I’m just into it.” 

  Matsuda has been able to devote more time to maintaining her garden everyday, which is often where she goes to think. “A lot of my writing took place in my head while I was pulling weeds,” she said. Before I left, she walked me through a tall lush patch in the front of their home teeming with Portuguese cabbage, herbs, mustard greens, and kalo, and handed me two green eggplants. Between an assortment of fruit trees, a composting and water catchment system, and their three chickens (they named their first set Nina, Ella, and Sarah, after their favorite jazz vocalists), Matsuda dreams of one day becoming fully sustainable.

In conversation, the two are forthcoming and open and when prompted, speak fondly of another, by turns gushing and matter-of-fact. “I always knew, from pretty early on, that I was just totally in love with Mari and trusted her as a person,” said Lawrence. “Not just ’cause she was smarter than me, and not just because she’s a good person, but because she really cares about me.” The fact of their relationship strikes the couple as both destined and miraculous, almost inevitable considering it emerged from a very small milieu of law professors of color who were challenging the white status quo of critical legal studies in the 1980s, but still beaming with the sparkle of wonder and gratitude. They’re also quick to note that it’s taken a lot of work. 

“We had a couples therapist in D.C. for about six to eight years,” said Lawrence, “and fortunately she was good. She really helped us through a lot of hard stuff. And it wasn’t that it was hard in the sense that our marriage was falling apart, but it was…”

“We had stressors,” Matsuda said. 

Since retiring, they’ve remained engaged on multiple fronts, cultivating new creative pursuits, and with it, new forms of community, while remaining steadfast in their commitments to advocating for social justice, curbing climate change, and demilitarization. 

“They’ve been to any meaningful protest, at least that I’ve ever been to,” the poet, activist, and educator Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio told me. “They’re
barometers in that way. Like, ’Am I doing the right thing? Well, Chuck and Mari showed up so I must be on the right track.’ They’re not just pillars in the community but these magnets that are pulling our compass in the right direction.”

Though she first met them as a child, Osorio became closer to the couple when she started teaching at UH-Mānoa in 2018 and was chosen by Lawrence to join his junior faculty seminar. For 12 years, he’d select around 10 new faculty members from different departments throughout the university, with an emphasis placed on Kānaka Maoli, and host bi-weekly dinners at their home. It was a chance for young professors and scholars to not only discuss the papers they were working on but to share food and talk about their lives and dreams, and some of the difficulties they faced navigating the academy. These were issues Lawrence knew by heart, having taught at places like Stanford Law School, in the ’80s, when he often felt isolated as one of the few Black people on staff. He considers the students he mentored through the seminar to be family. 

“It is kind of incredible that no senior Hawaiian faculty had taken this kind of kuleana as their own to really mentor young Kānaka faculty, especially with their own understanding of how challenging it can be — not just to be hired into our institution but to survive our institution,” said Osorio. “And I can only guess that Chuck looked around and saw that there was this gap that he could fill. This speaks a lot to who Chuck and Mari are: when they see gaps that can be filled they do what they can to fill them.”

For Matsuda, art is the next frontier. In the beginning of 2021, she went into urgent care after noticing a sharp pain in her chest, and was later diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. By that fall, amidst chemotherapy treatments, she had enrolled in the MFA program at UH-Mānoa (she is currently in full remission). “The cancer put me in this last chance frame of mind,” she said. “I had to face the fact that my life is finite, and if I have something I want to create it’s going to have to happen now, or it’s never going to happen.”

Despite long being interested in the arts, Matsuda said artistic pursuits once felt “indulgent” next to her legal work. “But I’ve come to see that the artwork is actually the same work,” she said. “You’re trying to connect on an emotional level around things that you care about, so that people are willing to join you in transformative acts.”

You’re trying to connect on an emotional level around things that you care about, so that people are willing to join you in transformative acts.

Mari Matsuda

She’s capacious in her mediums, working with found objects and instruments constructed out of rescued parts (she recently made a Dobro but can’t find an instructor on island to teach her how to play it), metal sculpture, woodblock prints, and performance. In 2023, her first solo show, Radical Wāhine of Honolulu, 1945, exhibited at Aupuni Space, honored the lives of nine Asian and Kānaka women, all working class progressives who radically shaped the history of labor organizing in Hawai‘i. A critic for Artforum described the show as “a shrine to the belief that art and politics are not separate.” 

Lawrence has embarked on a creative project of a different sort: writing the story of his life. He recently completed a non-credited autobiographical writing class at UH-Mānoa, and had written about six chapters when we spoke. Though he’s not sure if he’d like the book to get published yet, he’s approaching it as a valuable exercise in reflection, while basking in the freedom of writing without footnotes. 

“It feels good, when you don’t have a whole lot of time in front of you, to spend time looking at the time behind you, which you have a lot of,” said Matsuda, laughing. 

“And trying to evaluate it and make it make sense to yourself and others — that’s a really interesting project.”

Matsuda likes to joke that if arranged marriages were still popular in the ’80s her parents would’ve set her up with someone like Lawrence. On the surface, an Okinawan girl born in Los Angeles and raised on O‘ahu, and a Black guy from New York 13 years her senior, was not an obvious match, except where it counted most: Both were raised by leftist, politically engaged parents who exemplified a dogged orientation towards justice. Matsuda’s parents were civil rights activists heavily involved in peace and labor movements in Hawai‘i and the continent, particularly as it related to demilitarizing Okinawa; Lawrence’s father was a politically engaged sociology professor and his mother, Margaret Morgan Lawrence, was the first Black female psychoanalyst in the U.S. Despite growing up on opposite ends of the country, Matsuda and Lawrence traveled in similar political circles, and both of their parents knew W.E.B. Du Bois. 

“We came up in a time when the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, really world-changing political formations needed the support of lawyers and intellectuals. And I always knew that’s what I wanted to do,” said Matsuda. “The slogan was ʻserve
the people.’”

Though Lawrence has no memory of it, Matsuda still remembers the first time they met. She was a graduate student at Harvard Law School at the time, attending a conference for lawyers of color at the University of Pennsylvania, where Lawrence was invited to speak. She recalled writing in her journal that night, “Chuck Lawrence said X, Y and Z. He’s so smart.” Then she added a little carrot: “And cute!” They were both married to other people at the time, but would enter each other’s orbit a few years later, in 1987, as part of an intervention by lawyers of color at a different legal conference at UCLA, which many now consider the genesis of critical race theory. They were both single by then, and Matsuda, a plucky young law professor at UH-Mānoa, was the one invited to speak this time. “The first memory I have of Mari is the first time I heard her speak, which just goes to show I didn’t fall in love with her body, it was her mind,” Lawrence said, laughing.

They started dating while teaching at Stanford Law School, and shortly after, moved to Washington D.C. together after accepting positions at the Georgetown University Law Center. They got married, had two kids, and co-authored two books. “When we were doing the book tour people would say, ‘How do you ever write a book together when you’re married? It’s just too much strain on the relationship,’” Lawrence recalled. “And I would say, ‘Well, it’s a lot easier than raising kids together.’”

“It almost became a break from that,” said Matsuda, “because parenting is the hardest job on the planet.”

With their kids still in high school, they moved to Hawai‘i in 2008, to be closer to Matsuda’s parents. Though she acknowledges that living in an integrated neighborhood in the D.C. area was the “best thing” for her family — “We felt so comfortable as a Black-Asian family,” she said — something always felt like it was missing. “I realize now I had a low-level depression the whole time I was away, because of not being able to see the mountains and the ocean. And not being able to count on aloha from other human beings.”  

Through Matsuda, the first Native Hawaiian that Lawrence met was the late activist Haunani-Kay Trask, and “we loved each other,” he said. “She was totally into that correspondence with Black consciousness. So when we came out here I was kind of immediately embraced by that part of the movement in Hawai’i, the sovereignty movement that recognizes the connection with anti-colonialism and anti-racism everywhere.” 

Although the Covid pandemic has hampered the large gatherings they used to throw at their house, community remains the lifeblood of their activism and a core tenant of their marriage. “Part of what brought us close was our friends, our colleagues, people like Kimberlé [Crenshaw], who we’re still very close to,” said Lawrence. “That was how you survived. The people that you could really talk to, that you could count on and trust. The people who were willing to get out on the picket line with you. Even now, these things come up: Who can you count on if you take some risky play? Who’s going to be there when people come after you?”

Between Matsuda’s art community and the university activist community Lawrence fostered through his seminar, they are often the oldest ones in the room — a realization that sometimes surprises the couple, who tend to regard the young people in their lives as peers. Lawrence recalled one of his mentees inviting her father to a faculty seminar, and his shock when he discovered they were exactly the same age. It’s a testament to how the couple approaches their role as kūpuna, with a wisdom that doesn’t preclude new ideas or experiences but instead acts as a portal to them. It’s an approach that’s also kept them young in their relationship. “I think I’m finally a grownup,” said Matsuda, when I asked if retirement feels like entering a new chapter of their marriage. “And I think that’s only recent.” 

At various points throughout our conversation, say when he spoke about his daughter, or his grandparents, or the people in his seminar, or his wife, tears would bloom behind Lawrence’s eyes and hang on the precipice of his lashes, before eventually falling. I asked him where they come from, and he smiled.

“I don’t know whether it’s tears of joy but… it’s tears of recognition. I guess it’s usually just that I’m remembering, or someone has said something that moves me about how wonderfully human it is that I’ve been in this relationship, or even when I’m talking about these people who became my community,” he said. “I realize what a rich time it’s been for me that I can be in that kind of relationship with other human beings.”