Racism, Racial Trauma, and Clinics: Reimagining Clinical Work Through a Racial Justice Lens

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 While the need to address racial trauma and structural racism in the classroom and in our casework is not new to
clinical education, the current moment of racial reckoning creates new urgency to reimagine our clinical work through a racial justice lens.  The goal of this session is to reflect on and refine our pedagogy, and hold ourselves accountable.  As clinicians, we face challenges meeting our racial justice aspirations.  At our respective institutions, we often teach predominately white students, who represent predominantly people of color.  Our students join clinic with ingrained and false ideas about what racial justice and public interest lawyering mean.  While clinic pedagogy has tools to help guide these discussions, we struggle with how to use these tools to effectively meet the current climate of emboldened white supremacy and to face oppressive systems of state and local government.  Stepping
back from our individual clinics, we often fail to push our entire clinical program to be more directly responsive to the communities of color that we serve.  

 

To address these challenges, this workshop aims to reimagine our work in the classroom, in supervision, and in
our clinical programs through a racial justice lens.  We will discuss what we mean by a racial justice lens.  We will also articulate how our students’ bias can reinforce racial trauma, frame challenges in the classroom and supervision, and categorize potential responses.  Using a role play, participants will explore these concepts.  Then we will consider how this intentional approach can be extended to clinic design.  We will discuss a clinic-wide Racial Justice
Listening Project, a project at the University of Tennessee Legal Clinic, where faculty and students are engaging in listening sessions with leaders in communities of color to identify ways that the entire clinical program can be
directly responsive to community goals.