For Whom The Bell Tolls

Andrew Breitbart's last gotcha was to bring to public attention a film clip of a law student speaking in support of Derrick Bell. Bell was the first African American to win tenure at Harvard Law School. The student, of course, was a young Barack Obama.

I haven't read any of Bell's writings in a long time, though I once used his book Faces At The Bottom Of A Well: The Persistence of Racism, in a course called Minority Politics. I don't have the text in front of me right now, but I recall thinking that Bell was a gifted writer and thinker and that his work was both readable and thought provoking. To put it mildly, I did not find it convincing.

The late Professor Bell was a proponent of Critical Race Theory. The word "critical" links it to an especially impressionistic version of Marxism. Here is a sample explanation from the UCLA School of Public Affairs:

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colorblind, however, CRT challenges this legal "truth" by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege. CRT also recognizes that liberalism and meritocracy are often stories heard from those with wealth, power, and privilege. These stories paint a false picture of meritocracy; everyone who works hard can attain wealth, power, and privilege while ignoring the systemic inequalities that institutional racism provides.

Those first two sentences reveal the heart of the idea. It wouldn't matter if there were not a single genuine racist left in America (as of course, there are). Racism could still be "engrained in the fabric and system of American society," and "pervasive in the dominant culture." This relieves the CRT scholar from any need to actually demonstrate racism on the part of anyone he or she chooses to criticize.

Critical Race Theory is not a theory at all, except in the sense that conspiracy theories are theories. The point is not to build a set of hypotheses organized around a general idea in order to tell you what evidence to look for, as genuine theories do. The point of CRT is to build a narrative that is both politically powerful and immune to evidence. Critical theorists are contemptuous of the very idea of science. All theories are merely "narratives" that serve the will to power of one group against others.

For a brief but devastating judgment on this, I offer Peter Wood from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Critical race theory has next to nothing going for it as a descriptive analytic of how American jurisprudence works. It doesn't fit the facts of American life from Brown v. the Board of Education, to court enforcement of the Voting Rights Acts, the Civil Rights Act, or hundreds of other pieces of legislation. Critical race theory is weirdly and wildly wide of the mark in either explaining how Americans have made and interpreted their laws for at least the last fifty years, and arguably long before that. CRT might have been useful as a historical frame for interpreting the Jim Crow era, but even then it fails to provide any sort of reasonable account of the 14th Amendment and Reconstruction.

That would be the problem. Of course CRT cannot tell us anything useful about the actual history and nature of the law, for its entire modus operando is to bend whatever it sees until it fits its "analytical lens." I would go further than Wood to point out that it is insulting to all those magnificent people, both Black and White, who struggled fearlessly to push the Civil Rights agenda and who sometimes gave their lives for it. CRT is both intellectually and morally pernicious.

All that said, does it matter that Barack Obama once stood up and spoke on behalf of Professor Bell? No. You can't tell anything about Obama from his brief remarks other than the fact that he was already a very good public speaker and that he admired Professor Bell. What he thought about Bell or Critical Race Theory isn't evident from his remarks.

Even if he was a CRT believer at that point, he was still a law student for Heaven's sake! Students in graduate institutions are typically young. They are immersed in an intense, frequently concentrated intellectual culture. They spend most of their time talking to their professors and other students. What happens after they leave that rarified atmosphere is what matters.

To be sure, if someone unearthed a tape of young Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum endorsing some whacky right wing theorist, you can bet that would be front page news at the New York Times. It is nonetheless stupid for conservatives to try to use Obama's association with Bell against him. No one is likely to care much, nor should they. It is only a distraction from the real issues that might matter in the present campaign.

Comments

[john davidson]

sorry, yawn...

[larry kurtz]

You and Sibby should get a room, jd: hang an effigy of the President, strangle a couple of cats, look at some porn, then pray for forgiveness for squandering your gifts from your creator as the flooding rivers of the Missouri and Mississippi send poison to the Gulf of Mexico…again.

[Ken Blanchard]

Larry: I realize that nearly everything goes over your head, but you might have noticed that I was defending Obama in this post.

[Bill Fleming]

KB, yes you were, and I for one appreciate it. Thank you.

BTW, I believe Kurtz was addressing the esteemed Mr. Davidson (he of the imaginary palamino bride.) LOL.

[Ken Blanchard]

Bill: you are correct. I hereby issue a retraction of my intemperate remarks about Larry. I misspoke.

[Donald Pay]

Like any theory, CRT can be pushed too far, but there is something to the fact that "institutional racism" has been and continues to be a problem.

You can start with slavery, where a slave's work went to building the assets that enriched white families and for generations built the American economy into a behemoth that excluded blacks from full participation. Slavery had a huge impact on black family structure as well as on the economics of black families and communities.

Purposely depressed wages for Mexican Americans working in mines were common in the Southwest until the 1960s, and some mines purposely excluded Mexican Americans from working at all. For generations some of the skilled (and higher paying) positions were off limits to Mexican Americans. This sort of discrimination was interesting because many of the southern European miners who worked some of these mines at reduced wages as well gained "white" status in order to keep Mexican Americans out. Of course, the Chinese were excluded from many jobs as well.

When you look at this over centuries, the capital assets that has been lost to many minority families has been enormous. Those assets went into building institutions and enriching white families, who could take advantage of those institutions to further their accumulation of wealth, education, and status.

[Ken Blanchard]

Donald: having scars left from a disease is not the same thing as having the disease. No one doubts that previous racism and ethnocentrism in America has left scares, and I don't think anyone seriously doubts that racism still exists in America. I know very well that it does.

However, saying that Harvard is guilty of "institutional racism" because it doesn't have enough professors of the right color (as Derrick Bell did, flamboyantly) is an abuse of language. It is an attempt to call something you don't like something that no one likes so you can compel the changes you want. the problem comes when you call it something that it manifestly is not.

Moreover, CRT's solutions are vacuous. Does it really do anything to end "institutional racism" to hire a few token professors? Fixing the problems that CRT addresses is a really big task. CRT has nothing to offer that will help.

[john davidson]

wake me up when something is happening...Larry, bro, you are losing me...

jd