Advancing Racial Equity: Legal Guidance for Advocates

Memorandum has been developed for advocates willing to seek to forthrightly advance racial equity objectives while hewing as closely as possible to prevailing legal constraints and limitations. It also seeks to clarify a few common but unfortunately pervasive misunderstandings that prevail in existing guidance for racial equity advocates. In particular, this memo has been written to help better clarify the difference between different types of race-conscious policy design, which are too often conflated in ways that undermine the development of high-quality policies and initiatives. This memo is replete with examples of a variety of race-conscious policies in order to help readers understand what these nuanced differences mean in practice.