Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a professor of law at Columbia and UCLA and one of the leading figures in the field of critical race studies. She wrote the following article for the Los Angeles Times, where she demonstrates that the new laws banning the study of systemic racism simultaneously ban Dr. King’s views of America’s racial problems, which were not solved by passing civil rights laws. The furor over CRT shows that racism remains a powerful force today. Critics of CRT maintain illogically that teaching the history of racism is racist, that uncomfortable facts must not be taught at all, and that history must be scrubbed clean of divisive realities. As Crenshaw points out, King would have fought the current effort to cleanse U.S. history; his own words and works cannot be taught.

For the first time, we’re observing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday under new laws in…