Kimberlé Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia School of Law in New York. Neil Gotanda is a professor of law at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton, California. Gary Peller is a professor of law at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C. Kendall Thomas is a professor of law at Columbia School of Law in New York.

In the past few years, a new generation of progressive intellectuals has dramatically transformed how law, race, and racial power are understood and discussed in America. Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This reader, edited by the principal founders and leading theoreticians of the critical race theory movement, gathers together for the first time the movement's most important essays.