Chicago City Wire

Chicago's incoming chief equity officer, Candace Moore, has fashioned much of her short legal career around a now repudiated Obama-era policy that racism is to blame for the inordinate disciplining and poor academic performances of many black students.

The 32-year-old Moore is now bringing that approach to “equity” to her new job as head of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s new Office of Equity and Racial Justice. The mayor has given Moore full power and range in the job that begins July 1.

She is “tasked with creating and advancing new policies and practices through the lens of equity,” said a press release from the mayor’s office announcing the creation of the new office and the appointment. “She will work to form partnerships with community stakeholders and city departments to strengthen and promote equitable outcomes throughout city government.”

It’s another step in a career that sets the stage for the “revolution,” as a newsletter published by the Black Youth Project (BYP) put it in a 2017 interview with Moore.  

“My profession […] expresses that I am more of a reformer than a revolutionary,” Candace Moore, speaking about her work with the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, told BYP. “But I love and respect and feel it is vital to be in relationships with revolutionaries. For me, I try to sit in that tension.”

Other credentials in the equity movement cited in the mayor’s press release include “completing the inaugural class of the Racial Justice Training Institute at the Sargent Shriver National Poverty Law Center and the inaugural class of the Surge Fellowship program focused on addressing the issues of race and class in urban education.”

Moore and the Civil Rights Committee scored a big victory in 2015 with the passage of SB 100, a controversial law that limits discipline in the schools along the lines recommended in a 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter from the Obama administration’s Department of Justice and Office for Civil Rights.

The recommendations stem from something called disparate impact theory, a theory that has since been debunked, according to Heather MacDonald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“A federal commission on school safety has repudiated the use of disparate-impact analysis in evaluating whether school discipline is racially biased,” McDonald wrote in a December 2018 article for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. “The Trump administration should go further, and extirpate such analysis from the entirety of the federal code of regulations, as well as from informal government practice.”

McDonald goes on to cite numerous examples of cities where the crime rate of black juveniles is many times higher than that among whites.

“The same family dysfunction and lack of socialization that create this juvenile crime wave inevitably affects classroom behavior,” she writes.

She continues that crime reports produced during the Obama years contained identical disparities.

“And yet the Obama administration held that the only possible reason why blacks are disciplined in school more than whites is teacher and administrator bias,” she writes. “Never mind that teaching is the most ‘woke’ profession in the country after social work, with education schools frantically indoctrinating their students in white privilege and critical race theory.”

Moore is a 2013 graduate of the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.