Projects

The state of California is facing a housing displacement crisis that
has been decades in the making. Local governments across the
state have responded to this crisis not by providing the resources
needed to address Californians’ unmet housing needs, but with
discriminatory animus directed at unhoused community members.
Yet, although Californians who are displaced from their housing are
routinely discriminated against and harmed, such discrimination is
not recognized under the law.

Nationally, communities of color are suffering through widespread government-sanctioned wealth extraction Local governments, constrained by shrinking budgets, routinely pass the costs
of administering the criminal justice system onto individuals and their families by charging fees and costs Stories of those impacted and the fight for justice have begun to dominate the national
landscape 1 Alameda County is no exception.

A civil assessment is a type of poverty penalty charged to people who miss a deadline to pay or appear in court. One
of the highest and most common fees in California, it is a $300 hidden fee charged to people in cases involving anything from
a traffic ticket to a felony. For many people, this can exponentially increase the amount they owe. For example, the addition of a
civil assessment and administrative fees can take a $35 base fine for running a stop sign and increase it by over 850 percent.

How we decide who is indigent has severe consequences for historically marginalized and underserved populations. Yet many of the rubrics for determining indigency and eligibility for services have been put into place without enough deep inquiry into how to best serve the populace in light of the diverse factors impacting their lives. In this way, access to justice programs fail to accomplish either access or justice in a comprehensive and holistic manner. As a result, current standards harm rather than help. Under the guise of access to justice, municipalities and other legal entities foreclose rather than expand opportunities for justice and threaten fair and equitable outcomes for the communities they claim to serve.

Anti-Blackness manifests itself in a myriad of ways, not all of which are intentional. That is what makes this work so challenging, so draining, so exhausting. Particularly if you, like me, see yourself as an impacted person first, and a lawyer second because to survive and thrive, the most important, most visceral parts of your identity – Black, male, child of a formerly incarcerated person – must take a back seat to the least important part of your identity – lawyer. After all, being a lawyer pays the bills, and the trauma, gravity, and import of being the Black son of a formerly incarcerated person is often a bit too much for people to handle in a profession like mine, where there are so few people with similar experiences.

Western Center on Law and Poverty Director of Policy Advocacy Brandon Greene addressed the growing pushback against corporate ESG (environmental, social, governance) measures, critical race theory, and other steps designed to counteract institutional racism.

“Right here in California, doctors are suing over mandatory anti-bias training despite widespread racial disparities across our healthcare system,” he said. “We’re seeing a current attack on everything racial equity and racial justice. After the killing of George Floyd (by Minneapolis police) in 2020, corporations made promises about racial justice, but subsequently have been rolling those back … A lot of discourse about a racial reckoning that wasn’t.”