UC Berkeley Law Professor Ian Haney López Keynotes PuLSE Forum on Race, Politics and 2020 Election

Ian Haney López, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley, who specializes in critical race theory delivered the keynote address on October 26, 2020 at The PuLSE Institute Literary Circle National Forum. The PuLSE Institute is an independent anti-poverty think tank headquartered in Detroit, the nation's largest African American city.

The PuLSE Institute is led by Detroit Attorney Tina M. Patterson, a social justice advocate and former federal government attorney for the Social Security Administration, who serves as the president and director of research at the Institute.

The Forum moderator is nationally renowned journalist and culture critic Bankole Thompson, who leads The PuLSE Institute's strategic editorial vision as an anti-poverty voice and guides its program. Thompson is the editor-in-chief and dean of the Academy of Fellows at the Institute. He is an opinion columnist at The Detroit News, where he writes a twice-a-week column on presidential politics, culture and socioeconomic issues.

The PuLSE Literary Circle is a high profile Forum conversation and keynote with authors whose books on issues of social change are making indelible impact across the global literary landscape. The thrust of the Forum is to promote critical literature that represents a diverse cultural landscape in the age of a multiracial democracy.

López, who teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law and the author of several books, is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on how racism has evolved since the civil rights era. His current research emphasizes the connection between racial divisions in society and growing wealth inequality in the United States. In Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (2014), López detailed the fifty-year history of how politicians exploit racial pandering to fracture social solidarity and ultimately to convince many voters to support rule by the rich. He is also the author of White by Law as well as Racism on Trial, books that respectively critique the legal construction of white and Latinx racial identity.

Lopez discussed his latest book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, where he explains how the political manipulation of coded racism has evolved in the Trump era, while also offering an evidence-based approach to neutralizing political racism and building cross-racial solidarity.