The fastest growing major in the Humanities, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) provides a deep understanding of how race and other modalities of power have structured human life and have informed the imagination of social transformation and justice in the past and the present. CRES accordingly offers a study of the dynamic power relations resulting from the cultural and institutional productions of the idea of “race” on a local, national, and global scale. Here, “race” is understood as a major ideological framework through which both practices of power and domination and struggles for liberation and self-determination have been articulated and enacted throughout modern history and in the contemporary moment.

Housed in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) Department, the Black Studies minor offers students grounding in the intellectual histories, political movements, cultural expressions, and critical theories of the black diaspora, all while engaging a range of methodologies from across disciplines. Attention to the significance of social justice is a hallmark of the minor. Supported by faculty expertise in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific, students can explore the globally multi-sited nature of black freedom struggles, both past and present, and examine blackness through a comparative lens.

Through careful advising, students can pursue a set of electives, tailored to their interests, enabling broad or deep exploration of specific histories, geographic regions, and thematic concerns.

Learning Experience

The study of “race,” as such, is a rigorous project, one which yields critical insights into the social, political, cultural, and economic processes that have defined and shaped the modern era—colonialism and slavery, conquest and displacement, genocide and warfare, migration and creolization, criminalization, imprisonment, and disenfranchisement, globalization and post-9/11 security state policies such as racial profiling. These phenomena orient our attention to particular academic fields with which CRES is necessarily in dialogue. These fields include postcolonial studies, settler colonialism studies, human rights studies, indigenous studies, migration, diaspora and border studies, mixed race studies, legal studies, environmental studies, and science studies.

CRES is a highly interdisciplinary major and an intellectual home to nationally renowned faculty who have contributed significantly to conversations in critical race and ethnic studies for decades, in anthropology, community studies, education, feminist studies, film and digital media, history, history of art and visual culture, Latin American and Latino studies, literature, politics, psychology, sociology, and the sciences.

Study and Research Opportunities

✔ B.A. program where students can design their own major based on personal and educational interests as well as career goals and objectives

✔ Undergraduate minor in Black Studies

✔ CRES and Education 4+1 Pathway

The 4+1 pathway into the M.A./Credential Master’s program allows CRES majors at U.C. Santa Cruz to:

✔ Apply to the Education master’s program through a streamlined application process.
✔ Earn a master’s degree and teaching credential in just one additional year (5 Quarters July to July)