EXECUTIVE OFFICERS

Ann F. Thomas

Board Chair

Otto L. Walter Distinguished Professor of Tax Law;

Director, Graduate Tax Program, New York Law School

In 1992, Ann F. Thomas began a second career in academic law with a fellowship year at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, after 17 years working in the corporate tax department at Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson, where she specialized in mergers and acquisitions. Professor Thomas spent two years as an adjunct professor at Yale Law School and joined New York Law School’s faculty in 1995.

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Professor Thomas, who teaches a range of tax courses and is Director of the Graduate Tax Program, was drawn to academia because of the chance to explore and develop a subject she views as fundamental to how societies function. She says her first love in taxation research is in the corporate and business context, but she also concentrates her scholarship on income tax and urges a re-examination of the assumptions about marriage and family that underlie current policy.

Kimberlé Crenshaw

President

Executive Director and Co-Founder, African American Policy Forum; Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School; Distinguished Professor University of California at Los Angeles Law School,  Distinguished Professor of Law, Promise Institute Chair in Human Rights

Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, is a leading authority on Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and co-editor of the volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution.

Crenshaw is the co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, a gender and racial justice legal think tank, and the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School. She is a leading voice in calling for a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice interventions, having spearheaded the Why We Can’t Wait Campaign and co-authored Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, and Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.)

Luke Charles Harris

Treasurer

Deputy Director and Co-Founder, African American Policy Forum;

Associate Professor of American Politics and Constitutional Law, Vassar College

Mr. Luke C. Harris, Director of Programs and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the African American Policy Forum, is an Associate Professor of American Politics and Constitutional Law. He clerked for the late A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., the distinguished scholar and former Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; and he served as a Fulbright Scholar to England at the University of Warwick, School of Law.

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Mr. Harris has served as Chair for Vassar’s Department of Political Science.

Mr. Harris is the author of a series of critically acclaimed articles on questions of equality in contemporary America, and he is completing a book entitled The Meaning of Equality in Post-apartheid America. Two of his essays “My Two Mothers and the Million Man March” and “The Challenge and Possibility for Black Men to Embrace Feminism” appeared in Devon Carbado’s edited anthology Black Men on Race Gender and Sexuality (New York University Press: NY, 1999).

George Lipsitz

Board Chair Emeritus

Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Black Studies

George Lipsitz is Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at UCSB. Dr. Lipsitz is virtually considered a father of Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture, and is a leading scholar in the fields of Whiteness Studies and American Popular Culture Studies. Dr. Lipsitz was a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego before joining the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He won the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship in 2013 and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Career Distinction in 2016.

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His publications include How Racism Takes Place (2011); Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (2007); Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (2001); and The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998).

MEMBERS

Barbara Arnwine

President and Founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition

Barbara R. Arnwine, Esq. is internationally renowned for contributions on critical justice issues including the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the 2006 reauthorization of provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Currently, she also serves as Co-Chair and Facilitator of the National Commission for Voter Justice, the Millennial Votes Matters Convenings and the Voting Rights Alliance.

Currently, she also serves as Co-Chair and Facilitator of the National Commission for Voter Justice, the Millennial Votes Matters Convenings and the Voting Rights Alliance. She was the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law from February, 1989 until June, 2015 and holds the honorific title of President Emeritus. She has served as the Charles Hamilton Chair for the North Carolina Central University School of Law from 2016-2017 and has also taught at Columbia University School of Law. She also created the legendary Voting Rights “Map of Shame” in 2011, which exposed the new modern wave of voter suppression in the states. Her groundbreaking civil rights and human rights advocacy has been honored with many prestigious awards. She is the radio host of Igniting Change and is a regular presence in the national media, and is often quoted in the press. A graduate of Scripps College and Duke University School of Law, she continues to champion civil rights and racial justice issues nationally and internationally in the areas of housing and lending, women’s rights, especially issues affecting intersectionality and African American women and girls, community development, employment, voting, education, policing restructuring, and environmental justice.

Chandra Bhatnagar

Assistant Vice Chancellor for Civil Rights, UCLA

In January 2021, Chandra S. Bhatnagar began serving as UCLA’s inaugural assistant vice chancellor for civil rights within the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. In this capacity, Bhatnagar oversees the newly created Civil Rights Office which serves UCLA’s campus and the UCLA Health System. Bhatnagar also serves as the Equal Employment Opportunity Officer and Affirmative Action Officer, ensuring that UCLA remains in compliance with all federal and state affirmative action, equal opportunity and nondiscrimination laws as well as University policies that prohibit discrimination and harassment.

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The Civil Rights Office was created to coordinate all civil rights investigations involving academic personnel, faculty and staff and unify the campus’s existing investigatory capacities led by the Title IX Office, the Discrimination Prevention Office, and the Staff Diversity & Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity (AA/EEO) Compliance Office. The Civil Rights Office will also strengthen UCLA’s ability to combat discrimination and harassment and support EDI’s broader strategic priorities of advancing opportunity for all members of the UCLA community.

Heidi Hartmann

President Emerita and Senior Research Economist, Women’s Policy Research (IWPR); Distinguished Economist in Residence for Gender and Economic Analysis at American University; Editor of Journal of Women, Politics and Policy

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Heidi Hartmann is the President Emerita and Senior Research Economist at the Washington based Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a scientific research organization that she founded in 1987 to meet the need for women-centered policy oriented research.  Dr. Hartmann is also a Distinguished Economist in Residence for Gender and Economic Analysis at American University and serves as the Editor of Journal of Women, Politics and Policy.

Dr. Hartmann lectures internationally on  women, economics, and public policy; frequently testifies before the U.S. Congress; and is often cited as an authority in various media outlets such as CNN and ABC News.

Lydia G. Mallet

Consultant; former Chief Diversity Officer and Leader of Global Talent Acquisition, DuPont

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Lydia G. Mallett, Ph.D. is a Global Human Resources Leader and Consultant.  Dr. Mallett has experience in consumer foods, safety and security and manufacturing industries. Her leadership roles have included Chief Diversity Officer and Leader of Global Talent Acquisition at Dupont. 

She led the development and execution of aggressive strategies for, Inclusion and Diversity, Employee Engagement and Talent Acquisition. Her dynamic, thoughtful and inclusive approach garnered leadership commitment, to support the implementation of business aligned programs and initiatives resulting in strong outcomes.

Prior to DuPont, Dr. Mallett was Vice President, Global Staffing and Diversity with Tyco International where she led the design and implementation of a global Inclusion and Diversity Center of Excellence and Global Talent Acquisition. Additional career moves included Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer and Business Partner for the Snacks business unit, for General Mills.

Ernest Quarles

Attorney; Adjunct Professor, Johns Hopkins University

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Ernest J. Quarles is an attorney, intersectional critical race researcher, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He formerly worked in the Communications Practice Group at HoganLovells representing major cable television companies and has served as domestic and international counsel for several telecommunications entities.  His courses focus on deficits in America’s storytelling, erased and marginalized histories, and U.S. racial history. Within those spaces, his methodology embraces intersectional frames and other critical lenses and, in so doing, enables truly transformational learning.

Mr. Quarles has also served as project counsel and faculty expert for several national HIV/AIDS initiatives based at Howard University for more than a decade.  Additionally, his work in the medical ethics arena involved advising clients on matters of ethical principles for clinical research involving human subjects.

Brian Wynter

Company Director and Consultant; former Governor of the Bank of Jamaica

Honourable Brian Wynter is a company director and consultant. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, The City University (London) and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, he was also called to the bar in the UK and Jamaica. He has financial markets experience in the private sector in Jamaica and New York and the International Monetary Fund’s Caribbean RTAC in Barbados. He was the founding CEO of Jamaica’s Financial Services Commission and, more recently, governor of Jamaica’s central bank during a decade of successful economic transformation. In 2020, he was awarded the Order of Jamaica for distinguished service to central banking and the financial sector in Jamaica.

Ezra Ishmael Young

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Cornell Law School

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Ezra Young is a nationally recognized scholar and civil rights attorney based in New York. He is currently a visiting assistant professor of law at Cornell Law School and maintains a boutique private practice. Ezra’s scholarly work has two strands. The first explores the rights of trans persons and is situated in the nascent field of critical trans legal theory. The second strand looks at innovative equitable remedies and is at the intersection of federal courts, civil procedure, remedies, and constitutional law.

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Ezra’s academic writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in books and articles published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, the New Press, American Psychologist, California Law Review Online, Cleveland State Law Review, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, and University of Chicago Legal Forum.