The nine justices of the Washington Supreme Court on Thursday issued an extraordinary open letter to the legal community urging lawyers to take steps to confront racial injustices in society and in the law.

“Recent events have brought to the forefront of our collective consciousness a painful fact that is, for too many of our citizens, common knowledge: the injustices faced by black Americans are not relics of the past,” the justices said in their letter. “We continue to see racialized policing and the overrepresentation of black Americans in every stage of our criminal and juvenile justice systems. Our institutions remain affected by the vestiges of slavery: Jim Crow laws that were never dismantled and racist court decisions that were never disavowed.”