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The Godfather of Critical Race Theory
In the 1992 book ‘Faces at the Bottom of the Well,’ Derrick Bell
used the techniques of fiction to dramatize his ideas about racism
Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School, April 1990.STEVE LISS/GETTY IMAGES
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ByAdam Kirsch
WSJ, June 25, 2021 9:25 am ET
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In the life of any big idea, there comes a moment when it stops
belonging to the thinkers who invented it and becomes public property.
Today, critical race theory is undergoing that kind of transformation.
When the term came into use in the 1970s and 1980s, it described the
work of scholars like Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé
Crenshaw, whose work was hotly debated in legal academia but little
known outside it. But over the last year, critical race theory has moved
to the center of American political debate.
In their book “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” Mr. Delgado and
Jean Stefancic list several of its core premises, including the view
that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational,” and that it “serves
important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group,”
that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the
mainstream thanks to the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement,
which was catalyzed by several high-profile cases of police violence
against Black people, as well as the New York Times’s 1619 Project and
bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X.
Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.” Critical race theory also informs
instruction at some schools and other institutions.
These ideas have now become a major target of conservative activism. In
September 2020, the Trump administration issued a memo instructing
executive branch departments to cancel “any training on ‘critical race
theory,’” which it equated with teaching “that the United States is an
inherently racist or evil country.” This year, legislators and school
boards in many states have introduced proposals to prohibit the teaching
of critical race theory in schools, with Florida’s State Board of
Education adopting such a rule earlier this month.
A rally against critical race theory in Leesburg, Va., June 12.
PHOTO:ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its
opponents than from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable,
since their writing was mostly aimed at other scholars. But at least one
major work is more accessible: “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” the
1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or
godfather of critical race theory.
Bell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today’s
controversies. In “Faces,” he blends the genres of fiction and essay to
communicate his powerfully pessimistic sense of “the permanence of
racism”—the book’s subtitle. Bell’s thought has been an important
influence on some of today’s most influential writers on race, such as
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander.
Derrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the
Air Force he went to work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of
the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left the job in 1959 after being
told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid
compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in
Bell’s work: Can traditional legal standards of objectivity and
neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans, or does fighting racism
require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the law?
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In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at
Harvard Law School. As he writes in “Faces,” “When I agreed to become
Harvard’s first black faculty member…I did so on the express commitment
that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be
the pioneer, the trailblazer.” But the school was slow to hire more
Black faculty, leading Bell to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up
spending the last part of his career at NYU Law School.
These experiences inform “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” which is
made up of nine fables, some with a science-fiction twist. In one story,
a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean, with an atmosphere that
only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a
system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against
Blacks—a kind of cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.
These far-fetched scenarios allow Bell to explore very real questions
about belonging and trust. Are Black people at home in America, or
should they think of themselves as sojourners in a land that will never
belong to them? Is racism a social problem that can be solved, or is it
a permanent condition like mortality, which can only be met with defiance?
Not every story in “Faces” has a dark ending, but most do—especially the
last and most famous, “The Space Traders.” In this tale, aliens arrive
on earth and make the U.S. government an offer: In exchange for
miraculous technologies that can heal the environment and ensure
prosperity, they demand to carry off the entire Black population of the
U.S. in their spaceships. When a referendum is held on whether to accept
the aliens’ offer, “yes” wins with 70% of the vote.
Bell suggests that the overwhelming majority of white Americans would
agree to send their Black fellow citizens to an unknown fate.
Since the U.S. population was about 12% Black in the 1990 census, Bell
is suggesting that the overwhelming majority of white Americans would
agree to send their Black fellow citizens to an unknown fate. This
conclusion reflects his theory of “interest convergence,” which says
that white Americans will only act in the interests of Black people if
it also serves their own interest. When the interests of whites and
Blacks are opposed, Bell argues, whites will always choose to put their
own interest first.
For Bell, this is the lesson of American history. As he observes in “The
Space Traders,” “Without the compromises on slavery in the Constitution
of 1787, there would be no America.” Similarly, after the Civil War,
whites in the North and South sacrificed the rights of former slaves for
the sake of sectional reconciliation. Bell suggests that the same thing
would happen in the alien scenario, and the story ends with a
nightmarish vision of Black Americans being herded onto spaceships:
“Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the
New World as their forebears had arrived.”
The image suggests that 400 years of American history have changed
nothing in the relationship between Blacks and whites. At the heart of
the debate over critical race theory, then and now, is whether such a
view is justified. Ms. Alexander, author of the 2010 bestseller “The New
Jim Crow,” wrote in the foreword to a 2018 reissue of “Faces” that “As a
law student, I read nearly every word Bell wrote; as a civil rights
lawyer, I was haunted by his words and ultimately forced to admit the
truth of them.”
Other commentators have strongly disagreed. The political scientist
Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about
a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where “I heard
the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that
blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because
Bell’s own life, as well as the fact that Harvard’s black law students’
organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim.”
Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as “more a jeremiad than an analysis.”
Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even
though it will never succeed.
In the conclusion to “Faces,” Bell argues that the struggle for racial
equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the
French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus’s eternal effort to
roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world,
Bell demands “recognition of the futility of action” while insisting
“that action must be taken.”
To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the
New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis:
“If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they
supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim
status?”
For his supporters and critics alike, Derrick Bell remains a central
figure. Nearly three decades after the publication of his most widely
read book, his stark vision of the racial divide in American society and
history has retained its power to provoke debate and activism across the
political spectrum.
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