About the Center for Racial Justice

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 2018, is an incubator, both in and beyond the university, for collaboration, grassroots organizing, socially engaged research, and liberatory arts practice that critique, imaginatively engage, and directly confront structural racism. The aim is a shaking of the status quo.

Visit our website at https://crjucsc.com/ for more.

Santa Cruz in Color

How is our local history tied to movements against racial injustice, dispossession, labor exploitation, deportation, neoliberal trade policy, imperialist wars, regional militarization, police violence and repression, displacement and gentrification, environmental racism, and educational inequity?

Santa Cruz in Color is a digital people’s archive and multimedia community storytelling repository that documents local grassroots social movements for justice throughout the Central Coast, with a focus on the greater Santa Cruz area. Visit santacruzincolor.org!

As a popular educational initiative that contributes to collective knowledge and resistance, this teachable digital archive catalyzes and deepens understanding of regional struggles against structural violence. Santa Cruz in Color works with community partners to document both historical and ongoing local movements and organizing against racial injustice, dispossession, labor exploitation, deportation, neoliberal trade policy, imperialist wars, regional militarization, police violence and repression, displacement and gentrification, environmental racism, and educational inequity.

Visit https://santacruzincolor.org/ for more.

Political education is another core function of our programming at the CRJ. Through collective study, we understand that our struggles are linked and our liberation is, too.

CRJ Summer Institute

The CRJ Summer Institute is an event centered on themed political education. Often starting out with a local focus, the Summer Institute aims to define connecting threads between the local and the global. The Summer Institute is held every other year. See highlights from 2022 and 2024.

Freedom Schools

In the tradition of freedom and liberation schools, the Watsonville Ethnic Studies Freedom School fosters a space of political education in the service of local communities most impacted by structural violence.

We formed the school in response to the failure of the prior PVUSD school board to heed the community’s call to support ethnic studies. From a foundation of community knowledge, we learn from each other and engage in collective study in order to organize for justice and enact social transformation. See more here.