Thurgood Lawyer Webinar
By Kenny Le | Oxford Key Club 25 days ago, Timmy forwarded an email from Douglas Gin, Key Club Administrator for the CNH District, to our executive board. Detailing Key Club International’s commitment towards eradicating “racial inequality and injustice” while also describing the reasons why Key Clubs could not expressly support the “Black Lives Matter” organized movement, Gin encouraged us to pursue “educational live streams and webinars”. So, of course, I immediately went in the direction of finding impactful local speakers, and lo and behold, I found the Thurgood Marshall Bar Association—the only Black Bar Association in Orange County. I cold emailed them, honestly not expecting a response, but they quickly communicated back to me. After a process sometimes marred by misunderstandings, miscommunication, red tape, and disagreements, yet at the same time incredibly useful and enlightening to me, this webinar finally happened. In summary of the webinar, lawyers Michele Bell and Ray Jones first went through the history of racial injustice in America. They described how the United States’ racist past has heavily contributed to the current inequities between Black communities and White communities in America. With policies that have barred Black Americans from having the resources to pass down generational wealth as easily as other groups, education, healthcare, and the criminal justice system have all disproportionately negatively affected Black people. The criminal justice system itself faces problems regarding “implicit bias”. Because juries and judges are predominantly comprised of non-Black people, their interpretation of the attendant circumstances regarding a Black case is incredibly skewed. Near the end, in response to a student’s question, they talked about their own lives. In their own words, people have told Michele “Can I touch your hair? You speak so well,” and a judge told Ray that he “Needed to stop making those faces.”
