The Los Angeles Lakers Thursday announced it has chosen a UCLA professor to be the team’s director of Racial Equity & Action.

“Dr. Brown will create a curriculum to help the Lakers staff enrich their knowledge on today’s most urgent topics, as well as helping to identify ways the team can be more active and efficient in creating change,” according to a statement from the franchise.

Brown is a tenure-track assistant professor in the departments of African American Studies and of Sociology at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2016, and an M.P.A. in Government Administration from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. She currently serves on the boards of The Obama Presidency Oral History Project and Du Boisian Scholar Network.

“We are very happy to have Dr. Brown join the team,” said Lakers COO & President of Business Operations Tim Harris. “She will play a key role in implementing educational programming on race and racism for our employees and helping us focus on racial equity in our day-to-day functions, as well as empowering the organization to identify ways to be more active participants in affecting real change.”

Brown is a Fulbright Scholar whose work has been supported by national foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Hellman Fellows Fund. She has been recognized for her writing about the lives, stories and experiences of black people around the world. She is the author of two books, “Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia” (UNC Press, 2018) and “The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line” (co-authored with Jos Itzigsohn, NYU Press, 2020). She is working on her third book, “Separate and Unequal,” about the history of racially segregated education systems and its enduring legacies on racial inequality in present-day education.

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