Racial Justice: The Role of Civil Legal Assistance

Racial discrimination and isolation underlie and exacerbate the legal, social, and economic problems that low-income people of color face. To address their legal problems, individual legal aid lawyers and paralegals have to employ both antidiscrimination statutes and community-based strategies; legal aid programs need to increase race-based advocacy, and the civil legal aid system as a whole has to focus on racial justice. None of this will happen, however, absent a change in what legal aid programs do and a new focus on racial justice.