Derrick Bell -- the scholarly godfather of critical race theory
In 2001, when Professor Bell talked about the lingering effects of racism, white privilege and micro-aggressions, it sounded like a bunch of Ivory Tower mumbo jumbo. Today, not so much.
Derrick Bell (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was an important American lawyer, professor, civil rights activist, author who is considered one of the fathers of critical race theory.
Born in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, he went to Duquesne University and Pitt Law School and then worked for the U.S. Justice Department and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
After working as a prominent civil rights lawyer for almost a decade, Bell had a long academic career lasting the rest of his life. At Harvard Law School he became the first tenured African-American law professor in 1971.
Alongside his teaching work, Wikipedia says “he developed important scholarship, writing many articles and multiple books using a legal lens to examine racism. Bell raised questions about civil-rights advocacy approaches, partially stemming from frustrations in his own experiences as a lawyer.”
As this recent piece in the New Yorker details, and as this earlier Wall Street Journal article also details, Bell is credited as one of the originators of what today is known as critical race theory.
In the early 2000s, when Bell was coming to speak in Pittsburgh, I interviewed him for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. The questions I asked him about racial issues and the answers he gave — 20 years ago — are more controversial and timely than ever.
Derrick Bell Q&A
Derrick Bell, 69, a longtime civil rights activist and visiting law professor at New York University Law School, made headlines in 1992 when he gave up his post at Harvard to protest the lack of minority women on the faculty.
His numerous books include the 1992 New York Times best-seller "Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism." It also includes the story "Space Traders,” which was made into an HBO movie. He was interviewed by phone from his office in New York City.
Question: If you were in Rome and an Italian guy asked you what it's like being a black man in America today, what would you tell him?
Answer: I'm not sure. It's so hard to explain to a white American what it's like to be a black person in America, if an Italian came up, or someone from another foreign country, it would be extremely difficult.
The situation in America with regard to race in general is one of denial -- historic amnesia: OK, it might have been bad before, but now we're all supposed to make it on our own. That influences everything.
To poor whites, it may be the reality as they understand it. But for blacks -- in the main -- it is, if not a lie, at least far from the truth that racism is a thing of the past. So it would be very tough.
Q: Do you consider America a racist society?
A: The problem is, when you say ‘racist,’ it's like calling somebody an SOB. It may be true, but it's irrelevant. What we have in America, if we kind of flip that, is an unconscious sense of privilege based on race. That is, every white person — whether they want it or not, whatever their politics or what-have-you — has a presumption of regularity that they should be there.
The white person doesn't get stopped out in the white neighborhood because he or she is driving a fancy car, as that young guy was in Pittsburgh several years ago. You can rebut the presumption, but the presumption is there -- when you apply for a job, when you apply for a loan, when you walk down the street at night.
And black people have to be aware that, whatever their status, they do not have a presumption of regularity. And that has all manner of effect on your life. Is it as bad as being picked up and lynched as was the case earlier? Heavens no. But is it something that is a burden and a barrier. It absolutely is.
Q: What is the worst manifestation of racism?
A: We still have overt racism -- the dragging of the guy in Texas, some of the police brutality that gets a lot of attention. It seems to me that, as serious as they are, they tend to take the focus away from the real problem: the continuing discrimination in employment, with regard to who gets hired, who gets promoted....
But the real problem is the disparities in prison sentences. Crack cocaine and powdered cocaine, you know that one. But it happens at every level. Blacks and whites charged with the same things, with the same background of criminal offenses, get horrendously different penalties.
So we have close to 1 million black folk -- mainly young men -- in prison. As bad as being dragged to death behind a pickup truck is, the fact that the War on Drugs ends up really being a war on blacks and Hispanics in this country -- those are the serious things.
Q: In terms of race relations between whites and blacks, are things getting better, falling behind or static?
A: There are just so many instances of black people moving ahead. I heard a story a few days ago: 50 years ago if you heard that 100 white guys were chasing one black guy, you'd figure it was the Ku Klux Klan and a lynching was coming up. Today, when you hear 100 white guys are chasing one black guy, you say, "Oh, it's the PGA."
I think in a number of areas there have been progress. You can't talk to any of those blacks who have really made it who don't have all these stories of privilege. That's the great challenge. Not only does it have advantages for whites, whether they want them or not, but it also has disadvantages. It means that whites are reluctant to join causes and programs that blacks are pushing, when the whites need them as much as blacks.
Affirmative action is probably a good example. The fact is, if you submitted affirmative action to a national referendum, probably 80 percent would be opposed to it. And yet, if you look at the history of affirmative action, the major beneficiaries have been white women. The journalism industry is a good example.
The problem is, as my late wife Jules, also a Pittsburgher, used to say, is that so many of the white women are with you until they get ahead. Then they stop being women and start being white.
White men have benefited. Jobs generally were filled by the old-boy network. Now, if you look at the Chronicle of Higher Education, it is two inches thick, mainly with ads in the education industry looking for people that they never had to place before.
When I was dean at Oregon, before I got there it was a small law school, and the dean would call downtown and say, we need a torts teacher. And they'd set up a lunch with a young guy who looked promising, and he'd come out and talk to them and the next thing he was getting a year’s trial. The world never knew about that job.
When I got there we had to advertise jobs. Even though our pay scale was very low we'd get 300 applications for each job -- most of them white men who would never have heard about it.
Am I saying there was no subjectivity in the overall process? I can't say that. But you had to set up a committee -- how are you going to deal with 300 applications? And so some guys had a much better crack at jobs that they would never have heard about otherwise. So that part gets lost.
The great challenge of today is the need for white leadership who can convince whites that the privilege of whiteness, No. 1, it exists, and No. 2, its benefits are outweighed by its disadvantages. That's the challenge.
Q: What do you say to those who say the economic, social and political success of blacks in the last 50 years is an unprecedented success story for an ethnic group, and that we don't applaud or recognize that enough?
A: I wouldn't shout the person down, because this is my business. What my sensitivity is, is to the problems that remain. So I'm willing to acknowledge that blacks have come a long way.
When I look at the statistics -- salary, wealth, income, education, life expectancy -- you see that the applause should be subdued. I think applause is appropriate, but given the continuing situation, and the tentativeness of so much of even the success --
I like to watch football on television. I think going to the game is kind of a waste. But I turned off Monday Night Football the other night. I just could not deal with all those black guys down on the field and three white guys up in the booth, one of whom doesn't know a damn thing about football, ha ha ha.
Q: Dennis Miller of Pittsburgh.
A: He's from Pittsburgh?
Q: Castle Shannon.
A: He's trying to be the funny guy. They're feeding him all the statistics and stuff like that. What is he doing up there?
Q: If you could snap your fingers and rearrange American society to your liking, what would it look like?
A: If I could create white leadership who could get across the message that I stated earlier -- about convincing whites that they are privileged in being white.… It would be tough, but that would be the challenge.
Q: What will your talk in Pittsburgh be about?
A: I don't know how much talk they want at a dinner dance, ha ha. So it's going to be fairly unstructured. I'm working on a book about what were the qualities and standards in my life that helped me to whatever success I have gained. It's partly answering the question that many successful blacks are asked, "Gee, Bell, if racism was so bad, how did you succeed?" That's part of it.
The other part is, how to deal with what one psychologist called them, “micro-aggressions,” that you get from people who don't realize that they are bombarding you with them?
How do you deal with your colleagues who when you point out that this minority candidate that they are rejecting based on his qualifications had better qualifications than you had?
“I have lesser qualifications than you guys, yet I get better teacher evaluations, I've written more, blah, blah blah." And they look at you and say, ‘Yeah Derrick, but you're different.” I want to talk very off-the-cuff about those things.
Q: If that same Italian guy in Rome had the sense that you were famous for something in America, what would you tell him it was?
A: Probably... that's a good question... probably for taking a stand against a powerful entity -- Harvard Law School. I wouldn't have imagined that that would be my major claim to fame. There were books written, and teaching, and legal cases handled, but that struck an awful lot of people.
Bill Steigerwald
Substack:
Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. Sprigle's original series is in Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Steigerwald also wrote Dogging Steinbeck, which exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. And in 2022 he published Grandpa Bear Goes to Washington, a satirical kids book for all ages that all polar bears and lovers of freedom will like.