Clarence holds over a decade of experience advancing social change through legal and policy advocacy. He is a nationally recognized expert on the role of emerging technologies in producing racial and social inequality through algorithmic racism, mass surveillance, and other privacy and civil rights abuses. He offers a wide breadth of experience: from serving as the first digital justice litigator at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to leading community-based direct services in his native Alabama. He has worked in academia, government, and nonprofit organizations in communities across the United States.

Clarence is currently the Senior Attorney for Civil Rights and Technology at TechTonic Justice, a new national digital rights organization addressing the impact of AI and algorithmic systems on low-income communities. Clarence has served as Senior Policy Counsel for Justice at the Center on Law and Social Policy and as 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 a leader of the PASCO Coalition—one of the first successful campaigns to defeat predictive policing in schools. He was an inaugural member of the Just Tech Fellowship at 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, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Education Week, Vice, Stateline, 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 of Sciences, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, SXSW EDU, the Mozilla Foundation, ACM FAccT, the Southern Education Foundation, the Columbia Journalism School, and many others. He has provided strategic insight, analysis, and recommendations to a diverse range of stakeholders, including federal, state, and local policymakers, agency leaders, philanthropic organizations, civil society groups, 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 received the Howell Murray Alumni Association Award, and majored in Political Science and Human Rights. He is currently based in Washington, D.C., and admitted to practice law in the state of New York.