Discussions: White Supremacy and Progressive Lawyering in 2020 and Beyond

Please join the American Constitution Society's University of San Francisco Student Chapter for our final discussion of the semester. We are excited to welcome Iman Boukadoum, Senior Manager of the Fighting Hate & Bias program, and Stephen Menendian, Assistant Director and Director of Research at the Othering and Belonging Institute.

At this event we will discuss the laws and processes that bolster white supremacy, the fight to change those laws, and the processes in such a tumultuous time, and how all of us can continue this work in 2020 and beyond with a special focus on Progressive Lawyering as a tool.

To attend this event please register here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaker Bios

Stephen Menendian

Stephen Menendian is the Assistant Director and Director of Research at the Othering & Belonging Institute. He leads the Inclusiveness Index initiative, an assessment of global inclusivity, fair housing policy, and opportunity mapping projects with the state of California, including a recent investigation on the extent and harmful effects of racial residential segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Menendian’s primary areas of expertise are structural racism, fair housing, affirmative action and educational equity, and civil rights law. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of inter-group inequality, and the design of effective equity interventions under prevailing interpretations of law. As a leading expert in these areas, he has authored many scholarly publications, book chapters, journal and law review articles, and regularly contributes to the Berkeley Blog. He also assisted in developing, and co-authored, the Institute's Amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. the Inclusive Communities Project, cited by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision recognizing disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act. 

Iman Boukadoum

Iman Boukadoum is the senior manager of the Fighting Hate and Bias program, an extension of The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights. The group advocates against white supremacy, creating the hashtag #WhiteSupremacyKills, collecting information on hate crimes, and providing resources to communities and individuals to combat hate crimes. As a human rights lawyer, Boukadoum has years of policy, litigation, and community engagement experience, focusing on intersectional ways in which the War on Terror, War on Drugs, and immigration laws harm Arab-Americans and other marginalized communities. She was a senior staff attorney at the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and founded the Wafa House Inc. litigation clinic, where she represented marginalized immigrant survivors of domestic violence with limited English proficiency. More recently she founded the Muslim Social Justice Initiative—a rapid response nonprofit born in the wake of the Muslim travel ban and rise in hate crimes. The initiative serves low-income Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and African immigrant communities by advising, advocating, and supporting individuals unjustly impacted by the Muslim ban and ICE immigration raids.