A vital hub for racial justice, political education, and timely events. Brought to life by community and student activism.

At the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) is at the forefront of collective energy and visionary worldmaking for racial justice. Animated by a long legacy of campus and community organizing, the CRJ, which was founded in 2019, is an incubator, both in and beyond the university, for collaboration, grassroots organizing, socially engaged research, and liberatory arts practice that directly confront, organize against, and imaginatively engage structural racism. The aim is a shaking of the status quo.
EVENTS:
The great anti colonial thinker and fighter Frantz Fanon described the function of education in the metropole to be bewilderment. Committed to political education as needed clarification against the forces of obfuscation, the Center for Racial Justice organizes freedom schools, summer institutes, and workshops that center the perspectives of peoples most impacted by structural violence. By working with and collaborating with organizations within and beyond the university, the CRJ creates collective spaces where liberatory study informs transformation action and vice versa.
Image Credit/Caption: Berkeley, California. A sketch by Eric Liang Norberg. One of three concept sketches and proposals for the third world Liberation Front (twLF) mural to be housed in Barrows Hall at UC Berkeley.

NEWS & STATEMENTS
Davis Putter Scholarship 2026
Are you a passionate advocate for social change, and committed to building a better world for all? The Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund (DPSF) awards scholarships up to $15,000 to undergraduate and graduate students who are active in social justice movements. This scholarship opportunity is open to…
See detailsLabor Summer Paid Internship
UCSC Center for Labor and Community has officially launched Labor Summer 2026! Labor Summer is an eight-week, full-time paid internship where students work with unions and community organizations across the Monterey Bay Area on projects that build worker power and advance social justice. There is often strong demand for Spanish-speaking interns, and we encourage…
See detailsRe-imagining Santa Cruz: Introducing Santa Cruz in Color’s Inaugural Zine
Santa Cruz in Color, a community-based movement archive, housed under the Center for Racial Justice, has unveiled a 32-page news-magazine that showcases their coming collections & digital archive exhibits. The accompanying essays, written by CRJ interns, expose a darker side of the sunny Central Coast.…
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