#derrick bell

[mariwatchesmovies]

The Wiz (1978) dir. Sidney Lumet cine. Oswald Morris

[2mercia2furious]

i've been trying to figure out for the past month why i just don't feel like writing fic stuff rn. i'm for certain it's not just writers' block, it's grief.

today i ran into this list of books just removed from the Nimitz library. the majority of the texts on race, racism and identity are ones i taught, read or included in my work.

we don't really have a name for this kind of grief, do we? teacher grief, scholar grief, archival grief just don't do it justice when you're watching your colleagues and your field get devoured. it's not even really anticipatory at this point either. this is the part where the once slow train speeds past you.

and there's this anger that comes from seeing how vulnerable people are when they're denied access to things that could have helped. it's bitter like a stomach ache from too much coffee, and it claws back at you when you think you're well beyond its grasp.

please do what you can to protect your local library or start a little free library with books about the real history of this place.

[ishootcops]

[garadinervi]

Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. The Permanence of Racism, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1992

Design: Ellen Levine

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://lawdawghall.blogspot.com/2012/03/derrick-bell-whos-afraid-of-critical.html

Critical race theory writing and lecturing is characterized by frequent use of the first person, storytelling, narrative, allegory, interdisciplinary treatment of law, and the unapologetic use of creativity. The work is often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures. This is not to say that critical race theory adherents automatically or uniformly “trash” liberal ideology and method (as many adherents of critical legal studies do). Rather, they are highly suspicious of the liberal agenda, distrust its method, and want to retain what they see as a valuable strain of egalitarianism which may exist despite, and not because of, liberalism.

C-SPAN Booknotes: Thomas Sowell (1990)

Brian Lamb: What's the state of prejudice in the United States today compared to earlier years in your life?

Thomas Sowell: It depends on the base here, like most comparisons. If you take 30 years ago, certainly greater in the academic world. In the book that I wrote about colleges, I urged minority parents not to think that because they had a good experience on a particular college campus 30 years ago, that their children will have that good an experience today, because the racial tension is enormous on many campuses. The colleges themselves try to say that they're victims of the racism of the larger society, and in point of fact, the racism on the campuses is greater than that in the larger society, in many campuses. And what I worry about is that they're going to graduate into the general society, blacks and whites alike, who hate each other's guts, and who can be the leaders of new racial strife for the future.

Lamb: What's causing that on college campuses?

Sowell: One of the factors is the preferential policies. But it's more the just that, because that in itself sets in motion a series of events, which add to the original resentment over the preferential policies. That is, you put yourself in the position of a black kid who comes out of the ghetto school, and he's gone through for 12 years with nothing but A's and B's, without a great deal of effort, and now he finds himself for the first time in his life in a predominantly white environment, and he finds that when he works twice as hard as he's ever worked, all he gets back for his work is a D, and that there is also a minority establishment -- this is true not only of blacks but of minorities in general -- an establishment which tells him, "Yes, this is the racism on this campus -- the white power structure is trying to keep you down." And it has to have a certain plausibility to it. It would have a certain plausibility to me had I come along in that era.

Now, I was fortunate enough in one sense that, having grown up in the south and then transferred to New York, I was shifted between different levels of education, and so I was a top student in my class in North Carolina, and then I was immediately the bottom student in my class in Harlem, and I was way behind whoever was next to the bottom, because the educational differences were just that great. A very painful period of adjustment, but there was no racial issue involved, since all the other kids ahead of me were all black. And so I got through that, and then for a second time in my life, I had gone out on my own when I was 17, and I didn't return to college full-time until I was about 25. For the second time in my life, I went into an environment that was very difficult compared to what I'd been used to, and once again I was way behind and I was in danger of flunking out of school the first semester.

Lamb: Where were you then?

Sowell: Harvard. Really, it really is incredible -- for the first time in your life, in ten years, you're a full-time student, and you're a full-time student at Harvard, without a high school diploma. So there were little difficulties.

Lamb: And studying what?

Sowell: Oh, at that stage I was studying just general things, but I majored in economics, and all my degrees are in economics. Again I had an enormous adjustment to make, but there was no one there to tell me, "All these white professors have it in for you and that's why you're doing badly." Because first of all, I had done badly in Harlem, and I'd overcome, and I was doing badly there and I overcame it, but ...

Lamb: What happened -- take that Harvard experience through. How long did you stay at Harvard?

Sowell: Oh, I graduated.

Lamb: Graduated from Harvard.

Sowell: From Harvard.

Lamb: I'm sorry, I thought you said earlier you went to Howard.

Sowell: I went there for a year and a half, and then I transferred to Harvard.

Lamb: Oh, okay.

Sowell: You see, but I was going to Howard in the evening while working full-time during the day so when I went to Harvard I was a full-time student for the first time in ten years, and so that was a...

Lamb: And what years did you go to Harvard?

Sowell: I graduated in class of '58 -- so that you can understand how the student would find this plausible. I talked to a black man recently, a lawyer, who said when he was in law school, he was told when he first got there, that Professor X never gives black students more than a C, you know, and he got a B+, but there was great consternation because one of the myths had fallen. But, it's truly criminal what goes on in terms of using and manipulating the students to serve all kinds of external purposes.

Lamb: Can you give us an idea of the kind of external purposes you're talking about?

Sowell: Oh, political purposes. I just a couple of days ago was told by someone from Wellesley that there's a divestment campaign at Wellesley, demonstrations, the whole thing, and that those black girls who did not want to participate in that were threatened with violence -- and that's not unique. At Stanford the Hispanic students, some Hispanic students, have complained that the Hispanic establishment has threatened them if they don't want to go along with what's being said and done, and they claim that only 15% of the Hispanic students at Stanford have ever attended a single event spons.ored by the Hispanic establishment, which speaks boldly in their name. Ah, and so you have this kind of thing going on at these schools across the country. Again, notice, that once, once you let in the students who cannot make, meet the academic standards, you're going to end up having to let in professors who can't meet the academic standards. You're going to have to create courses that don't meet the academic standards.

Lamb: Correct me on the, on the names and everything. Derrick Bell?

Sowell: Yes.

Lamb: Harvard Law School, black man.

Sowell: Yes.

Lamb: Threatened the law school if they didn't hire a black woman, he's going, he's leaving?

Sowell: Well, if I understand it correctly, he's taking unpaid leave until such time as they hire a woman of color, as he says. Well, he's also said that by black, he does not mean skin color, he means those who are really black, not those who think white and look black. And so what he is really saying is he wants ideological conformity in the people that are hired to fill this position. That's not uncommon either. I know a black woman, for example, who had a Ph.D. -- she's had a book published, she has another contract on another book, she's taught at a couple of very nice places, she has a devil of a time getting a job -- not a job in a prestigious institution, a job teaching at a college. And the reason is that she gets shot down, blackballed, whatever, by people who don't like her ideology. That's happening not only racially, it's also happening where race is not an issue. In a law school, I learned recently, there's a woman who was being considered for a tenured position, and all the men voted for her and all the woman voted against her, because she does not follow radical feminism. And so you're getting these ideological tests, so that at the very time that there's all this mouthing of the word diversity, there is this extremely narrow ideological conformity that is being enforced wherever people have the power to enforce it.

Lamb: What did you think of Derrick Bell's whole plan?

Sowell: Well, his chances of success will depend on whether or not he has overestimated his importance to the Harvard Law School. I think it would be a tragedy if they caved in, and I was very pleased to see that they seemed to show some backbone, which is quite rare among academics.

Lamb: Now, what do you think of the press treatment of him?

Sowell: It's been quite gentle.

Lamb: I mean, is he a hero?

Sowell: To me?

Lamb: No. Basically, I mean, from the press coverage, you've seen, is he a hero to the ...?

Sowell: Well, he's looked at as an idealist who is self-sacrificing and so on. I suppose one could, if one wanted to look at it that way, have seen Hitler that way in his early days. It's just a question of where that kind of idealism leads. He has launched a despicable attack on a young black professor at the law school who doesn't go along with this. A young man named Randall Kennedy, who has written a very thoughtful, intelligent article last June in the Harvard Law Review, questioning some of the assumptions that people are making, people like Derrick Bell and doing it in a very gentlemanly as well as very logical way, empirical way, and that's not what they want. They want the conclusion to be that -- they want him to march in lock step and he won't do it, and they're doing their best to make life impossible for him.

Lamb: What do you think Harvard will do?

Sowell: I've heard that Kennedy -- and I don't know this -- I've heard that he has tenure, so I think that he may be all right.

Lamb: But, I mean, what do you think they'll do with ...

Sowell: Derrick Bell?

Lamb: Yes.

Sowell: I hope that they will resist it, and since it's gotten so much publicity, I'm not sure they could stand to cave in to it. I was very pleased to see that Alan Dershowitz of Harvard had criticized this and that he picked up the fact that what Bell is really asking for is not only that people be hired by race, but that they be hired to fit Derek Bell's ideology.

Lamb: What would happen if this was going on at Stanford Law School?

Sowell: They'd have caved in long ago.

Lamb: Stanford Law School would have?

Sowell: Yes. I think so. It's a judgment call, but that's my judgment.

Lamb: Why would they do it so quickly?

Sowell: Just looking at their track record. They have perfected the technique of preemptive surrender.

[ Full interview: https://youtu.be/T2hPQ86lGV0 ]

==

Reminder:

“Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

“As mentioned earlier, critical race scholars are discontented with liberalism as a framework for addressing America’s racial problems. Many liberals believe in color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law. They believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations.” -- "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction" by Delgado and Stefancic.

Thomas Sowell saw this coming 30 years ago. Of course, Harvard now routinely capitulates to tantrums; the most recent FIRE Campus Free Speech Rankings gave Harvard the lowest grade numerically possible due to it acceding to shrill, illiberal ideological demands.

[soulakuarian]

Case in point: Affirmative Action.

[vegan-and-sara]

The Man Behind Critical Race Theory

As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of though

“Bell spent the second half of his career as an academic and, over time, he came to recognize that other decisions in landmark civil-rights cases were of limited practical impact. He drew an unsettling conclusion: racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. Racism, he began to argue, is permanent. His ideas proved foundational to a body of thought that, in the nineteen-eighties, came to be known as critical race theory. After more than a quarter of a century, there is an extensive academic field of literature cataloguing C.R.T.’s insights into the contradictions of antidiscrimination law and the complexities of legal advocacy for social justice.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, which inherently represented a validation of the civil-rights movement, seemed like a refutation of Bell’s arguments. I knew Bell casually by that point—in 2001, I had interviewed him for an article on the L.D.F.’s legacy, and we had kept in touch. In August of 2008, during an e-mail exchange about James Baldwin’s birthday, our discussion turned to Obama’s campaign. He suggested that Baldwin might have found the Senator too reticent and too moderate on matters of race. Bell himself was not much more encouraged. He wrote, “We can recognize this campaign as a significant moment like the civil rights protests, the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice in D.C., the Brown decision, so many more great moments that in retrospect promised much and, in the end, signified nothing except that the hostility and alienation toward black people continues in forms that frustrate thoughtful blacks and place the country ever closer to its premature demise.”

I was struck by his ominous outlook, especially since someone Bell knew personally, and who had taught his work at the University of Chicago, stood to become the first Black President. I thought that his skepticism had turned into fatalism. But, a decade later, during the most reactionary moments of the Trump era, Bell’s words seemed clarifying. On January 6th of this year, as a mob stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a Presidential election, the words seemed nearly prophetic. It would not have surprised Bell that Obama’s election and the strength of the Black electorate that helped him win are central factors in the current tide of white nationalism and voter suppression.”

[gettothedancing]

9 Years Ago, Breitbart Revealed Obama's Ties To Critical Race 'Godfather'

Today we see the culmination of years of independent media reporting that validates what many people now face in their workplaces and schools.

The left has sought for a decade to bury conservative media’s findings on CRT. Today’s commentators are engaged in a schizophrenic-like frenzy to protect their institutional allies. It is as if Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC News, and others have turned back the clock to 2012, with the targeting of Breitbart, Pollak, Shapiro, and all the rest mirrored in the young journalists who have taken this stuff on.

The only difference is that CRT is much more mainstream now than it was then. It’s ubiquitous. And the media is now faced with a reckoning. Can it truly hide something right in front of the people’s eyes like it did last time? Where will it end?

Just this week, Reid ventured to say conservative backlash to CRT is equivalent to far-right extremism. It is “an all-out war for power,” she said, as well as the effort is “steeped in…white nationalism.”

“Making it ‘Christopher Rufo theory’ is a way of personalizing it. The old [Saul] Alinsky method of personalizing something. And if they can demonize him enough, maybe this will go away and people will stop talking about it,” Pollak also told me.

What we are witnessing today is the culmination of years of independent and conservative media reporting that validates what many people have come to realize: Corporate media will do whatever it can, however, it can, to hide the truth in order to appease party allies and mold narratives consistent with their political ideology.

CRT’s emergence into the public consciousness — albeit more widespread given its application in schools — is nothing new. But deceitful elites would have you think so. The media has been fortunate to be able to mold what Americans think of their history for decades.

But unlike 2012 — when parents did not overwhelmingly deal with CRT-infested curricula and employees could clock in and out without hearing the word “equity” — it is all too real.

At this point, the more corrupt outlets decry CRT as just another right-wing conspiracy, the more Americans will recognize the truth. Too many leftists who read teleprompters in soulless studios and craft editorialized theses crave nothing but power. Even if it means destroying America with manufactured racial tension to get it.