"At this odd juncture of American life, when many state and local governments are moving to stifle conversation around race in classrooms and beyond, UCLA’s law school is charting the opposite course, pioneering the use of Critical Race Theory to examine American race relations.
Critical race studies came to occupy a central place at the School of Law beginning in the 1990s. Since its inception, the program has touched hundreds of students, shaped countless conversations and debates and become what one professor, Devon Carbado, who joined UCLA’s law faculty as critical race studies was becoming established, calls “a transformative force.”
Jennifer Mnookin, dean of UCLA Law, agrees. Programs that teach critical thinking on race are “facile targets” in today’s politics, she said, and though it is tempting to laugh off some of the criticism, it must be taken seriously “because really substantial efforts are underway to impact the way people teach and talk about race.”
California stands as an outlier against that trend. Indeed, though California’s governance struggles are complex and sometimes disheartening, UCLA’s focus on how to study and combat bigotry has placed the university and California more broadly at the vanguard of scholarship seeking to reckon with America’s plague of racial intolerance."
