As critical race theory has come under misguided attack in recent weeks, UCLA School of Law professors, including many of the foremost experts in the field, have been in high demand. Our faculty members have driven the conversation in the media and elsewhere, setting the record straight on what CRT is – and isn’t – and reframing the conversation around the established principles that they have applied for decades.

Home to the first and only law school-based Critical Race Studies program in the country, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, UCLA Law hosts many pioneering CRT academics. For example, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in her 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” and Cheryl Harris, UCLA Law’s vice dean for community, equality and justice, wrote the 1993 Harvard Law Review article “Whiteness as Property,” which is a landmark in critical race theory scholarship.

Here is a sampling of the many media reports where UCLA Law professors – Crenshaw, Harris, Laura E. Gómez, LaToya Baldwin Clark, and others – have lent their keen voices to bust the myths and push back on the attacks against critical race theory.

• The Washington Post – “The panic over critical race theory is an attempt to whitewash U.S. history”
• The Associated Press – “So much buzz, but what is critical race theory?”
• NBC News – “Explaining the controversy behind critical race theory”
• Vox – “What the hysteria over critical race theory is really all about”
• Marketplace – “Critical race theory has been around for decades — why’s it a powder keg now?”
• MSNBC – “The conservative war on Critical Race Theory gets a lot wrong. But understanding it matters”
• The Nation – “The Predictable Backlash to Critical Race Theory: A Q&A With Kimberlé Crenshaw”
• NBC News – “Trump’s White House says critical race theory is anti-American. Here’s the truth”

For more from our expert faculty members, please tune into a July 26 panel discussion hosted by UCLA Law and the Critical Race Studies program, “Critical Race Theory Under Attack: The Fight for Antiracist Education,” in which Harris and others will discuss the present state of affairs and the path forward.

UPDATE, Sept. 20, 2021

Faculty members factor prominently in two major magazine feature articles on CRT.

• Vanity Fair – “‘I See My Work as Talking Back’: How Critical Race Theory Mastermind Kimberlé Crenshaw Is Weathering the Culture Wars”
• The New Yorker – “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory”