Black LGBTQ Justice Affirming Assessment (BLGBTQJAA) Certification is a micro‑credential training delivered over four days (three hours per session, 12 hours total) and offered twice annually. The curriculum integrates theory, applied writing, advanced communication skills, interviewing skills, community engagement, and experiential learning in drafting mock intersectional multidisciplinary Black LGBTQ justice‑affirming enhanced extra-judicial pre-sentence reports. It is our hope that, with continued advocacy, these reports will be recognized and accepted by the courts.
A multidisciplinary team of specialized practitioners from clinical and non clinical fields (e.g., psychiatry, psychology, family medicine, social work, criminology, law, and community advocacy) will provide Black LGBTQ-affirming enhanced assessments, reports, and letters. Employing a Black LGBTQ Justice Affirming Intersectionality analysis (BLGBTQJAI), experts will examine the intersectionality of how BLGBTQ justice issues affect people at the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender identity, recognizing that problems and solutions rarely arise within a single disciplinary domain. Black LGBTQ Justice Affirming Intersectionality (BLGBTQJAI) is a theoretical framework that examines how the meanings and categories of Black LGBTQ justice vary across social contexts. Its purpose is to capture the relational complexity of Black LGBTQ justice across multiple aspects of the criminal justice system and across analytical categories, rather than focusing on complexities confined to a single social group or a single category. Our work moves beyond a narrow focus on race and culture alone to document and analyze how multiple axes of exclusion and discrimination combine to impact blended social identities and an individual’s lived experience.
BLGBTQJAA experts will develop a nuanced understanding of Black LGBTQ Justice impacted individuals to produce intersectional multidisciplinary court-ready enhanced reports which will provide judges with evidence-based, trauma informed, and community validated context to support fair, proportionate outcomes. Essentially, Black LGBTQ-affirming enhanced justice impact reports address some of the gaps in analysis from lawyers on how they frame arguments as they relate to Black LGBTQ multiple discriminations and pan-Blackness to move beyond representation. Employing a Black LGBTQ Justice Affirming Intersectionality analysis (BLGBTQJAI) should be contextualized as seeking not to replace a focus on Black heterosexual and cisgender people’s experiences within the criminal justice system but to expand extant understandings of injustice by identifying the multiple and compounding marginalizations experienced by justice-impacted Black LGBTQ gender-nonconforming, gender-expansive, and nonbinary people.
Detailed course materials and the complete outline will be shared directly with approved registrants on the first day of the program.
