You could see Detroit as an opportunity desert, surrounded by a sea of opportunity. How did that get there? We're fighting spatial structural racism. Many people are very comfortable with the status quo
and we, as a program, the Detroit Equity Action Lab, are not. And so we see a way to very intentionally connect and weave these threads to leverage all of these resources. We've got to get the law students and the law school involved, and that's the area of movement lawyering. Organizing is a sk
ill just as important as
anything they learn in the legal classroom. Movement lawyering has an opportunity to have a really immediate impact in
the criminal justice system. And then I think, equally important,
we have to imagine new uses of data to be making meaningful progress
on structural inequalities. And we have to build the narrative function,
alright, because narratives change beliefs. That impact the way that we see things,
that inform our implicit bias, then inform the way that we m
ake laws. And the Detroit Equity Action Lab
was intended because we needed to ground our work in community. And
the expertise is in the communities. DEAL has a network of folks who have been doing racial equity work within
their organizations across the city. These things are interrelated. And
this is the range of creativity to address spatial structural racism that
a civil rights center has to be known for. Within the boundaries of
Detroit we have a container, starting with the hub of DEA
L,
to test things, to evaluate, and then to replicate. We already know the need.
Now we just need the resource.
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