Ian Haney López

To understand the modern Supreme Court, Haney López began to study the politics of judicial appointments, quickly coming to recognize that the justices hostile to civil rights were appointed by presidents who campaigned on coded themes of racial threats from people of color. In 2011 he gave the annual Derrick Bell Lecture on this topic at New York University School of Law. Sherrilyn Ifill, currently head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, named Haney López's NYU talk as the "Best lecture on race and the law" for 2011.

Haney López has described Ronald Reagan as "blowing a dog whistle" when the candidate told stories about "Cadillac-driving 'welfare queens' and 'strapping young bucks' buying T-bone steaks with food stamps" while he was campaigning for the presidency. He argues that such rhetoric pushes middle-class white Americans to vote against their economic self-interest in order to punish "undeserving minorities" who, they believe, are receiving too much public assistance at their expense. According to Haney López, many whites, convinced by powerful economic interests that people of color are the enemy, supported politicians who promised to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime but in doing so voted for policies that favor the extremely rich, such as slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, union busting, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state. He argues that these same voters cannot link rising inequality which has impacted their lives to the policy agendas they support, which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the top one percent of the population since the 1980s.

Ian F. Haney López (born 1964) is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in the area of racism and racial justice in American law.

Haney López born on July 6, 1964, in Hawaii, where he was raised. His father, Terrence Haney, is from Washington. His mother, Maria López Haney, is from El Salvador. Ian changed his surname from Haney to Haney López while a graduate student at Princeton University to honor the Latino tradition of using both his parents' names, though also to resist the "honorary whiteness" that is sometimes offered to accomplished people of color.

He is a pioneering writer in the genre of critical race theory. He gained early renown for White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. The book explores judicial efforts to interpret the legal requirement, utilized until 1952, that one be a "white person" in order to gain naturalized citizenship. He next published Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice, which documents how police violence helped racialize and radicalize Mexican-American activists during the late 1960s, leading to the development of a non-white Chicano identity.