A Critical Race Confession (op-ed)

 

Recently, Dr. Cornel West, a philosopher and progressive activist, resigned from Harvard because he was denied a tenured position. West posted his resignation letter to his social media account for the public to read.   More people are probably aware of his resignation letter than they are aware of the forward he wrote in the 1995 book – Critical Race Theory: The key writings that formed a movement.

West stated, CRT compels us to confront the most explosive issue in American civilization: The historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy.

West also highlighted the writings of Derrick Bell. Bell was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1930 and became the first tenured African-American professor of law at Harvard Law School in 1971. Bell is considered one of the founders of CRT. In 1992 Bell published the CRT classic – Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.

Now, if anyone bothers to look for Faces at the Bottom of the Well online, they might think the book is miscategorized because it’s under the genre – political fiction.

This might be confusing to those not familiar with CRT, but it’s perfectly normal to CRT insiders. The use of narrative or “legal storytelling”, which has historically been excluded from legal discourse, is central to CRT. Mari Matsuda, law professor and CRT scholar, called this narrative approach “outsider jurisprudence”. Matsuda stated, “This method is consciously both historical and revisionist … The desire to know history from the bottom has forced [CRT scholars] to sources often ignored: journals, poems, oral history, and stories from their own experience.” 

Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well is described as allegorical.  In a 1993 book review, law professor Margaret M. Russell, wrote Bell’s book “conveys its author’s personal reflections in the form of quasi-confessional “chronicles”, which blend Bell’s legal and life philosophies into dialogues with a number of fictional characters … The chronicles express the frustrations and disappointments of a veteran civil rights scholar and advocate, who concluded that nearly all of his well-intended litigation and policy strategies have been at least ineffectual and quite possibly counterproductive.”

Bell’s pessimism was based on three principles that were core to his thinking since the 1970s.

1). The interests of African-Americans will only be promoted when they either advance or do not impede the interest of white Americans.

2). Racial progress only occurs when the interests of African-Americans and white Americans align.

3). Racially progressive measures are systematically rolled back when those measures no longer serve the interest of white Americans.

Now, the controversial social critic, Stanley Crouch, published a collection of essays in 1995 called The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race. In this collection, Crouch told of a time he participated in a panel discussion with literary giant Ralph Ellison, Derek Bell, and other civil rights activists from the 1960s.

Crouch remembered that Bell took the position that “there had never been a time when anything had happened in the interest of black Americans that wasn’t the result of white people acting in their own interests.”

Infuriated by this sentiment Crouch replied, as a supposed scholar of American law, Bell should have known that the intellectual and political engagement of African-Americans had redefined every element of the social contract, expanding outward what had been a formerly restrictive vision of law and democracy.

Crouch stated Bell was caught on the panel dismissing a noble tradition of difficult accomplishment, and Bell admitted that he overstated the case.

Crouch concluded, “There it is. I accuse Bell and his ilk of being, fundamentally, defeatist, people who accept high positions of success, then tell those below them they don’t have a chance. Pay no attention to me: The white man won’t budge for you … The case of Derek Bell is one of selling out to hysterical alienation by so overstating the case that the issue is smudged beyond recognition.”

Today, the question is: Does CRT recognize and analyze contemporary racial issues, or does it permanently promote an overstated case of racism?

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 7/21/21