This on-demand CLE takes the form of two streaming videos with a combined total of one hour. As more fully described below, the two separate videos are:
- A 29-minute excerpt from Race – The Power of an Illusion by California Newsreel ()
- A 31-minute excerpt from a presentation by Michelle Alexander regarding her book The New Jim Crow
- Not included in CLE, but highly recommended additional 18-minute video: True Colors: Racial Discrimination in Every Day Life
The event code is 217244. 1.0 Elimination of Bias credit approved.
The faculty member accessible to all participants via electronic or other means for the 24-month period of certification is Martha Delaney, JD, at Volunteer Lawyers Network.
This on-demand CLE is free. Register for credits here after viewing the seminar.
Course Content
1) 29-minute excerpt from Race – The Power of an Illusion
Starting in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Authority enabled millions of Americans to purchase their own homes with a new policy which revolutionized lending practices. Before the new policy, to purchase a house, you had to pay 50% up front. With the new policy, you could put 10-20% down and the bank financed 80% of it over 30 years at relatively low rates. Tax dollars helped make the single family home a mass-produced item. Find out why, between the 1930s and 1962, of the federal government’s underwriting of $120 billion in new housing loans less than 2% went to nonwhites. Then, after 1962, why other practices resulted in homes owned by people of color decreasing in value as compared to home owned by whites.
2) 31-minute excerpt from presentation by Michelle Alexander regarding The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander asserts that a racial caste system exists today in America, that we have gone to great lengths to avoid knowing this claim, but that the drug war is the new Jim Crow. The criminal justice system is not just another institution infected with racial bias. Mass incarceration in the US has come to function as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of social control analogous to Jim Crow. It is no longer permissible to use race overtly as the basis for discrimination. So we don’t. Rather, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color as criminals and then engage in all the discriminatory practices we supposedly left behind. In short, today is it perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in all the ways it was once legal to dis against African Americans. Once you’re a felon, all the old forms of racial discrimination, including housing, employment denial of right to vote, and exclusion from jury service, are suddenly legal.