Systemic Equality: Equal Access, Better Futures

Historic and ongoing segregation and discrimination has prevented marginalized groups — particularly Black communities — from accessing safe, affordable housing and home ownership.

Equal access to housing is a civil right. We must work to reduce mass evictions and barriers to housing opportunities that disproportionately impact Black women renters, and restore important housing protections to expand equal access to housing opportunities for everyone.

Everyone deserves equal access to safe and stable housing.

Our fair housing work includes:

• Challenging Mass Evictions and Barriers to Housing Opportunities: Black women and their families make up the demographic group most likely to face eviction in the United States, resulting in a myriad of harms and reinforcing segregation. Our multi-part campaign includes securing the right to counsel in eviction cases, prohibiting the consideration of prior eviction records in tenant screening, and more.
• Advocating for the Right to Representation: We are engaged in right to representation campaigns in Delaware and New Jersey to ensure all people facing eviction have the ability to assert their rights in court.

Black people and communities of color, in particular, have faced numerous obstacles to meaningful participation in the political process, including the redistricting process. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits the drawing of district lines that dilute the voting strength of communities of color. When Black people and communities of color are minimized through the redistricting process, they are not adequately represented in our democracy, perpetuating the systemic inequality many voters of colors already face.

Redistricting plans should fairly reflect the political strength of communities of color. As data from the last Census confirms, nearly all of the country’s growth over the past decade is attributable to the growth in our nation’s communities of color. Fair maps and voting policies must adequately reflect that reality.

The right to vote should be equally accessible to everyone.

Our voting rights work includes:

• Equal and Fair Political Representation: As part of our ongoing work to ensure legislatures reflect their constituencies and address the longstanding underrepresentation and disempowerment of Black communities, we will advocate for fair voting district maps in six priority states in the South to obtain more equal representation for Black voters.

Investing in punishment while undermining what we need for equal and thriving communities has resulted in overcriminalization and the unjust and unequal treatment of our communities — especially Black communities.

We improve public safety by addressing root causes of crime, such as poverty and lack of opportunity, while also focusing on strengthening communities through investments in promising solutions. These include increasing access to affordable housing, jobs, education, health care, and mental health and substance use services in our communities. At the same time, we must work to reduce the number of people incarcerated, surveilled, and criminalized by law enforcement and in the courts. We must challenge dehumanizing conditions in jails and prisons and ensure that people returning to our communities are equipped for success. We must challenge cruel, extreme, and discriminatory punishments such as the death penalty and life without parole. We must work to erect meaningful constitutional guardrails on law enforcement — including jail and prison administrators.

We have the power to choose and to invest in real solutions that increase equality, justice, and safety for all of us.

Our criminal justice work includes:

• Challenging Policing: Part of a larger campaign to reimagine community safety that uses litigation and integrated advocacy to challenge racially-biased policing practices and advance community-based and non-punitive approaches to public safety.
• Shrinking the Geography of Mass Incarceration: An integrated effort, our litigation and advocacy will focus on developing legal challenges to stop funding for the expansion or construction of prisons, jails, and detention centers.
• Ending Racially Discriminatory Jury Selection in the Death Penalty: The jury selection process in death penalty trials, known as “death qualification,” removes otherwise qualified jurors from serving in capital trials based on their opposition to the death penalty. The process discriminates against Black jurors, who are disproportionately opposed to the death penalty. The history of the death penalty in America is inextricably tied to the history of lynching, and the opposition to the death penalty within the Black community is rooted in that history. This disenfranchisement from jury service is a fresh injustice compounding the injustice of racial terror and violence.

Systemic inequities and barriers keep people — particularly people of color — from accessing the mainstays of economic life; including education, employment, and homeownership; resulting in racial disparities in wealth and income. These disparities result from a combination of ongoing discrimination, structural inequality, and biases across our institutions, and emerge in new forms of technology, including through artificial intelligence, that influence nearly every facet of life.

Through litigation and advocacy, we aim to remedy deeply entrenched sources of inequality and ensure that access to opportunity and the ability to build wealth is available to all.

All people should have an equal opportunity to earn a living, find a home, and get an education.

Our economic justice work includes:

• Exposing Discriminatory Hiring and Lending Tech: Leveraging research and integrated advocacy, we will promote a more equitable approach to AI policy and expose and stop the use of biased, discriminatory hiring and lending technologies that perpetuate hiring and employment discrimination.

All students have a right to an equal education, but students of color (particularly Black students), students with disabilities, and low-income youth have historically been marginalized, criminalized, and under-resourced by the public school system.

We will challenge unconstitutional disciplinary policies that disparately target Black students and infringe on their right to a safe learning environment. We will also support race conscious admission policies to increase access to underrepresented groups who face systemic barriers to higher education.

All students deserve equal access to a high quality education, a safe learning environment, and a diverse student body that enriches the educational experiences of all students.

Our education equity work includes:

• Defending Race Conscious Admissions: The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the ACLU of North Carolina filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold universities’ ability to consider race in college admissions.