Anne D Gordon, “Cleaning up Our Own Houses: Creating Anti-Racist Clinical Programs”

This article seeks to guide legal clinics to self-evaluate regarding how clinics perpetuate racism unconsciously. This article offers concrete suggestions for implementing change. Law schools are homes to white supremacist culture. Beliefs, values, norms, and standards support the widespread ideology that whiteness holds value. Characteristics of this culture include: perfectionism, either/or thinking, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, individualism, defensiveness and denial, fear of conflict, power hoarding, and urgency. Clinical supervisors must be willing to help students see beyond this paradigm and encourage them to critique the world while seeking to create change.

Legal clinics are also white spaces. Within legal clinics, the majority of American clinicians are white. This creates circumstances where students of colour might feel unsafe with their supervisor, hindering their learning. As a consequence, mentoring and feedback might not be pursued. Supervisors must establish a culture of openness, communication, vulnerability, and excitement to mitigate problematic clinic experiences. Further, clinics can reproduce white supremacy culture when they fail to situate anti-racist work in the context of legal education as a whole and, rather, confine these discussions to clinic-specific issues such as client interaction. Demanding perfection and punishing mistakes, treating students differently based on capacities, requiring students to work in one particular way, and failing to recognize group effort are some of the ways that supervisors promote elements of white supremacy culture.

However, clinics are also an ideal locus of change for many reasons. First, clinical pedagogy involves qualities that are antidotes to white supremacy cultural norms. Second, an anti-racist environment is essential where students represent people of colour and work in diverse environments. Third, many clinicians are already motivated to make changes by the nature of clinical pedagogy and the access to justice components of many clinics. Fourth, the decentralized structure of governance and focus on innovative thinking is a breeding ground for change. Fifth, central to the clinician’s role is mentoring and modelling for law students. Lastly, change in clinics will benefit law schools at large.

This article provides a series of suggestions for clinics to become anti-racist. The suggestions center around two stages: coming together around mission and building a strategy based on articulable goals. The goals should be concrete and may include the nature of recruitment, retention, and promotion of faculty and staff, antiracist awareness and skill-building, systems and policies, and measurement and accountability.

Anne D Gordon, “Cleaning up Our Own Houses: Creating Anti-Racist Clinical Programs” (2022) 29:1 Clinical L Rev 49.