An Alabama native with over a decade of experience in advocacy and social change, Clarence is committed to advancing transformative change with an interdisciplinary skillset. 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. Clarence is currently a member of the inaugural cohort of Just Tech Fellows and works as Senior Policy Counsel at the Center for Law and Social Policy. His work focuses on the role of AI technologies in reimagining structural racism—especially mass criminalization—within communities of color. He particularly focuses on the impact of school surveillance technologies and data criminalization techniques used against marginalized youth and young adults in school and community settings.

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, and recipient of the Dean John Sexton Prize. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he 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.