An Alabama native with over a decade of experience, Clarence is committed to advancing transformative social change through an interdisciplinary skillset in community-driven legal and policy advocacy. Clarence’s experience ranges from working at national organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to grassroots organizations in his native Alabama. He has worked in nonprofits, government, and academia in communities across the United States. He is a nationally recognized expert on the role of emerging technologies in producing racial injustice, with a particular focus on surveillance, discrimination, and criminalization of Black and brown communities. His work has especially focused on the impact of school surveillance technologies and data criminalization techniques used against marginalized youth and young adults in school and community settings.

Clarence is currently Senior Attorney at the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology. He is a co-founder of the No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition and an original member of the PASCO Coalition. Clarence is an inaugural Board member of the National Collaborative on Transformative Youth Policy. He also is a member of the Advisory Committee on Disability Rights in Technology Policy for the Center on Democracy and Technology. Clarence was also a member of the inaugural cohort of Just Tech Fellows hosted by the Social Science Research Council.

Clarence’s work has been featured across a range of media outlets including Politico, The Nation, Fast Company, The Hill, Stateline, Education Week, Vice, Statescoop, and GovTech among others. He frequently presents on topics of race, technology, and the law to a variety of audiences which have included the American Bar Association, the National Academies on Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics, SXSW EDU, the Mozilla Foundation, ACM FAccT, the Southern Education Foundation, the Columbia Journalism School, and many others. He has offered strategic insight, analysis, and recommendations to a variety of stakeholders including federal, state, and local legislators, agency leaders, civil society leaders, direct service providers, and—most importantly— grassroots activists, organizers, and community leaders.

Clarence’s motivations are rooted in his family’s origins in the Black, rural South, where the afterlives of Jim Crow and slavery continue to shape daily life. Clarence is a graduate of the New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar, Colloquia Editor for the Review of Law and Social Change, Co-Chair of the Black Allied Law Students Association, and recipient of the Dean John Sexton Prize. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he was an Odyssey Scholar and studied Political Science and Human Rights. He is currently based in Washington, D.C., and admitted to practice law in the state of New York.