A path to tenure shaped by questions of inequality

By Matthew Clair

“Mr. Clair, I wish I was White. Black is ugly.” After a lesson on the Civil Rights Movement, one of my third-grade students pulled me aside and whispered those words in my ear. I was unsettled. Every student in my classroom that year was Black, and just about every teacher in our Atlanta public school was too. I realized that being surrounded by abundant ways of being Black had not protected my student from internalizing dominant understandings of our country’s racial hierarchy. I also wondered why my lesson on the Civil Rights Movement—a movement that I had always interpreted as evidence of a proud Black tradition of resistance and collective action—may have contributed to my student’s sense of racial inferiority. 

I applied to graduate school to make sense of the social problems I encountered in my classroom, but as soon as I completed my first year at Harvard, another kind of inequality caught my attention. It was the summer of 2013, and I had been closely following the George Zimmerman murder trial. When the news reported that Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, a teenager he killed for the supposed crime of walking in a hoodie while Black, the streets erupted. I joined the protests, and I also began asking a new set of sociological questions. I wondered what kind of legal system could excuse someone for killing a boy out of nothing more than antiblack fear while systematically incarcerating Black boys and men for far less. 

There was a myth whispered among schoolteachers in Atlanta at the height of mass incarceration in the early 2000s: the state, we told one another, built one new prison cell for every (Black) third grader who failed the state standardized test. This folklore motivated us to improve our students’ test scores as much as it terrified us about their futures. While I am unaware of evidence that policymakers tied future prison construction to third-grade testing outcomes, the myth speaks to a real relationship between the disciplinary control of Black kids in schools and the legal control of Black adults in courts, jails, and prisons. As the Movement for Black Lives gained momentum that summer, I shifted my research from schools to courts, keeping in mind their likely interdependence. 

I wondered what kind of legal system could excuse someone for killing a boy out of nothing more than antiblack fear while systematically incarcerating Black boys and men for far less.

Over the last fifty years, the United States has embarked on an experiment in mass criminalization, defined as the growing use of various punitive legal techniques. In any given year, about 2 million people are incarcerated and about 4 million are on probation or parole. Meanwhile, state courts process more than 16 million criminal cases every year. Black, Latine, and poor people bear the brunt of these interrelated techniques of legal control and extraction, yet growing numbers of White and middle-class people have also experienced policing, court processing, and incarceration. How do experiences of legal processing differ by race and class, and with what consequences? 

My dissertation research and eventual book Privilege and Punishment (Princeton University Press) sought to answer these questions. I spent over four years conducting fieldwork in Boston, Massachusetts, where I followed a racially and socioeconomically diverse group of criminal defendants—from an investment consultant and nurses to construction workers and people who were unemployed. In addition to speaking with defendants, I interviewed prosecutors, public defenders, and judges, and I followed respondents to their court dates and into private conversations with their lawyers. I waded through these data with the help of my committee members Michèle Lamont (co-chair), Devah Pager (co-chair), Lawrence D. Bobo, Bart Bonikowski, and Bruce Western—all of whom shaped the project in various ways, implicitly and explicitly, over coffee and in seminar rooms. 

Inequalities in court processing

Ultimately, my book emphasized how the legal system’s professional norms and organizational practices—not just direct forms of discrimination—reproduce inequalities in court processing.

Building on relational and cultural capital theories to conceptualize defendants as social actors within and beyond the courtroom, the book revealed how the attorney-client relationship constitutes and reproduces inequality through the power dynamics and uncertainty embedded in professional-client interactions. When disadvantaged defendants in my study cultivated legal knowledge and attempted to advocate for themselves in interactions with their lawyers and the court, they were often silenced and coerced. Meanwhile, privileged defendants were rewarded when they trusted in and delegated authority to their lawyers in key interactions in courtrooms and behind closed doors. The book’s findings revealed how attempts to gain legal knowledge and exercise legal rights often backfire for disadvantaged people, revising traditional understandings of cultural capital theory. 

My ongoing work at once extends my book’s focus on culture and inequality under the law and moves beyond it. I am increasingly reading and writing about state governance, social movements, work and occupations, morality, dignity, and democracy. Over the past five years, my students and I have developed an archive of court systems in the Bay Area, California, called the Court Listening Project, where we document ordinary people’s visions for changing the law and broader society. This work has resulted in peer-reviewed articles and informed the design of a “systems navigator” program that we piloted in our local public defender’s office two summers ago. Systems navigators are layperson advocates who work with felony defendants pretrial to help them access social services and work effectively with their lawyers. Our analysis of the program finds that navigators are associated with increased perceptions of dignity in public defense and a reduced likelihood of re-incarceration pretrial. Another research project has followed law school students over time to understand how a pervasive sense of social crisis in American democracy and law has shaped young adults’ careers and broader patterns of occupational inequality. Overall, I continue to be driven by core questions about inequality, law, culture, and state power in American society.

Read Asad L. Asad's path to tenure