This on-demand CLE (1.0 standard credit, event code 257065) takes the form of two streaming videos with a combined total of one hour. This on-demand CLE is free. Register here, 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
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.
Course Content
1) 29-minute excerpt from Race – The Power of an Illusion (“The House You Live In”)
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. In this way, tax dollars helped make the single family home an affordable and mass-produced item. But not for people of color. 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 people of color. Then learn about unchecked predatory practices starting in the early 60s which resulted in good homes owned by people of color sharply decreasing in value as compared to similar 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. With methodical presentation of evidence, as though to a jury in a courtroom, she asserts that mass incarceration in the US has come to function as a comprehensive and well-disguised system of social control analogous to Jim Crow. While it is now illegal to use race overtly as the basis for discrimination, our current criminal justice system (designed soon after the civil rights movement gains) labels an alarming numbers of people of color as criminals, then allows most of the old forms of discrimination (e.g., housing, employment denial of right to vote, and exclusion from jury service) to attach. One may not agree with her arguments, but it’s essential to understand this point of view, shared by so many in our country today, to participate meaningfully in conversations about current events.
For other highly-recommended resources (but not included in the CLE credit), please click here.