Derrick Bell remained a pessimist until the bitter end. He had risen from humble origins to become the first black professor at Harvard Law School. He had published bestselling books and won the praise of the national media. And he had been a mentor to a promising young student named Barack Obama, who would later win the presidency.
But in 2010, the year before his death from carcinoid cancer, Bell reaffirmed his basic principle: progress was an illusion, a myth, a false hope. “Barack is a brilliant politician, a very smart man, had a great campaign,” he said. But the reason that whites had cast their vote for him was not to heal the wounds of racism but to secure their own interests through a cynical political calculus. Bell did not see the election of America’s first black president as a transcendent moment, but as another pathway for the eternal recursion of American racism. “We are now not in the post-racism era, but rather in an era in which racism has been resurrected,” he said. “The truth is that we are still in a racist society.”1
Derrick Bell was a radical, but he was not a radical in the traditional mold. He was a soft-spoken academic who wore oversize black glasses and neat wool suits. He had a gentle courtroom demeanor and had written a dense, thousand-page casebook called Race, Racism, and American Law.2 At the same time, he was intimately connected to the left-wing radical milieu: Bell had provided legal support to Angela Davis at her murder trial, studied the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and maintained a close relationship with Black Panther Party members such as Kathleen Cleaver, the wife of Eldridge Cleaver.
But he was playing a different game than his contemporaries: Bell had seen the limitations of the Left’s militant turn in the 1970s and wanted to bring the fight out of the streets and into the faculty lounge. The black lumpenproletariat had revealed the ultimate impotence of Third World–style revolution. The superior gambit, Bell understood, was to rationalize those ideas and carry them through the elite institutions.
At this task, Bell was a master. He had a brilliant strategic vision and a surprising personal magnetism. During his long career at Harvard, Bell cultivated a cadre of young intellectuals beneath him—law students who would go on to establish the discipline of critical race theory—and encouraged them to challenge the institutions from within. In his own activism, he deftly manipulated the logic of affirmative action and the emotion of white guilt in order to achieve his political objectives within the academy. And, most importantly, he laid out a grand theory of racial pessimism that became the dominant tone for left-wing racialist ideology, moving it from the rhetoric of Marxist-Leninist revolution to the rhetoric of elite grievance.
It is not an overstatement to say that Derrick Bell set the stage for the racial politics of our time. Through a combination of legal and creative writing, Bell recast the American story in a sinister light. He argued that Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were the cynical authors of a “slave history of the Constitution,”3 that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,”4 and that the contemporary regime of colorblind equality was, in fact, an insidious new form of racism that was “more oppressive than ever.”5
In Bell’s fictional stories, which allowed him to transgress polite expectations with plausible distance between his characters and his own opinions, Bell filled his pages with spleen and paranoia. In his view, white society fed blacks with myths, symbols, and a national holiday, but would never provide them with real recognition. The stories in his most famous book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, featured “far-right paramilitary types”6 hunting down blacks in the woods and raised the specter that whites might exterminate their darker-skinned countrymen in a “black holocaust.”7 In Bell’s fantasies, whites traded blacks to space aliens, assassinated all of the black employees at Harvard, and paid license fees in order to practice open discrimination. Bell believed that progress was an illusion, telling his readers matter-of-factly that “black people will never gain full equality in this country.”8
Despite this posture of fatalism, however, Bell also demonstrated a method for achieving power. He staged protests, strikes, and denunciations. His cadre of student activists engaged in pressure campaigns under the banner of “diversity.” He embarrassed colleagues in public and threatened his resignation in the national press.
Bell was not a Huey Newton–style revolutionary, but something much more dangerous: an institutional player who understood how to use the politics of race to manipulate the bureaucracy. His most enduring accomplishments were grounded in his writings but became real through his disciples, who cobbled together his racial predicates with a substantive demand to deconstruct the constitutional order. These students, calling themselves “critical race theorists,” would throw acid on the founding principles of the country, making the argument for dismantling colorblind equality, curtailing freedom of speech, supplanting individual rights with group-identity-based entitlements, and suspending private property rights in favor of racial redistribution.9
The professor was not a doctrinaire Marxist himself—he admitted that he never had time to read Marx’s original texts10—but his students supplemented their legal education with a stew of critical theory, postmodernism, black nationalism, and Marxist ideology.11 And following the strategy of their master, Bell, the student-activists-cum-critical-race-theorists carefully cultivated their résumés for elite influence, not violent rebellion. They did not want to assemble bombs and set them off in the US Capitol or assassinate police officers. They wanted to create a theoretical basis for undermining the American regime as a whole by attaching their ideas to real administrative power in government, education, and law.
Now, a decade after Bell’s death, their blitz through the institutions has succeeded. Critical race theory, whether by name or through the euphemism of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” has become the default ideology of the universities, the federal government, the public schools, and the corporate human resources department. It is a stunning coup that began with the vision of one brilliant but troubled man.
* * *
The roots of Derrick Bell’s pessimism were planted in the clay shales of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Derrick Sr., was born in the cotton and peanut fields of Alabama, dropped out of school in sixth grade, and emigrated to the North to work in the steel mills. The family survived the Great Depression and Derrick Sr. eventually found work as a porter in a department store, earning a respectable nineteen dollars a week. His son, Derrick Jr., was small, bookish, and timid. The black children in the neighborhood terrorized him and ran him through the streets. “I was very small, couldn’t fight worth anything,” Bell recalled.12
Then the family’s fortunes changed. Bell’s father hit the numbers with the local bookmaker, earning a seven-hundred-dollar windfall, and Bell’s mother, Ada, insisted that the family put the money toward buying a three-bedroom house in a mostly white section of the city’s Hill District. Bell Sr. was proud of the home—they had a view over the entire city from their back window—and the fact that he earned enough for his wife to stay home with the children.13
Beginning in junior high school, Derrick took on a paper route, serving the homes of the neighborhood’s black professional class. He witnessed a remarkable tableau of black success—doctors, ministers, businessmen, lawyers, and judges—in spite of the ugly regime of racial segregation.
Two men along Bell’s route, Judge Homer Brown and attorney Everett Utterback, sensed a restless intelligence in the boy and encouraged him to consider a career in law. “[They] virtually adopted me. They invited me in for tea, to visit on holidays, and were always ready with advice that in short let me know that ‘we made it and so can you,’” Bell wrote.14 It was an era of unconscionable racial subordination, but Bell had seen the possibility of dignity and hope for the future. “My family enjoyed what was, by black folks’ standards, a middle-class life,” he recalled. “My parents encouraged and paid for my college education and that of my brother and two sisters.”15
Although Bell describes his white neighbors on the Hill as friendly and respectful, there was an undercurrent of racial tension in the Bell household. Derrick Sr. had grown up in the backwaters of the Deep South and had faced the cruelty of white racism, once getting whipped, bloodied, and humiliated by a group of white teenagers at the county fair. He taught his son to maintain an understandable suspicion of whites. “Neither of my parents hated whites. They simply dealt realistically with race issues as they found them,” Bell wrote years later. “My father often cited from a mental collection of racial assertions. Example: ‘Son, you must work hard because white folks are planning and scheming while we Negroes are eating and sleeping.’” He told his son that he could invite whites into their home, but “as for me, I never trusted them.”16
At the same time, Derrick Sr. taught his son how to be strong. When he worked as a porter and, later, after he started a business running sanitation trucks, Bell the father always demanded the respect of whites—and they gave it to him. As he told his son, after getting whipped by the white teenagers at the county fair, he tracked them down to a deserted stretch of road and pummeled them into the ground.
As he turned into a man, Bell Jr. was an immense success. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Duquesne University, served a stint in the US Air Force, and then, in 1954, following the encouragement of the black lawyers on his old paper route, enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. It was a buoyant year for black expectations. The Supreme Court had struck down racial segregation and the civil rights movement was beginning to deliver meaningful victories. Bell was the only black student at Pitt Law and, through his involvement with civil rights organizations, met the greatest black legal minds of the era: Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall, William Hastie.
After graduation, he secured a job with the Department of Justice, then with the NAACP in Pittsburgh, and finally with the NAACP’s central office in New York City. The attitude at the time was unadulterated optimism. Hastie, the first black federal judge in the United States, told young Bell that his interest in civil rights law was admirable but that he “was born fifteen years too late to have a career in civil rights”—in other words, the fight for racial equality was nearly won.17
Still, Bell poured himself into civil rights work with courage and gusto.
Between 1960 and 1966, he supervised or litigated nearly three hundred school integration cases in the Deep South.18 “During the early 1960s, I doubt that I was the only civil rights lawyer who saw him- or herself as the briefcase-carrying counterpart of the Lone Ranger,” he wrote. “We flew into Southern cities and towns, prepared our hearings with local counsel, and spoke out fearlessly in courtrooms often filled with hostile whites on one side, and hopeful blacks on the other. Whatever the outcome, we were the heroes to our black clients and their friends and supporters. ‘Lawyer,’ they would tell us admiringly, ‘you sure did stand up to those racists.’ We were, we thought, breaking down the legal barriers of racial segregation and opening a broad new road toward freedom and justice.”19
While pursuing this work, Bell married and started a family, which, due to the hectic pace in the office and on the road, he sometimes neglected.20 But he believed that he was serving the greater, maybe the greatest, cause of his time. And, by all accounts, he was a remarkable lawyer. He argued in the courts on behalf of James Meredith, who would become the first black student at the University of Mississippi, and crisscrossed the rural counties helping local blacks fight for school integration.
Over the summer of 1964, the New York Times dispatched a reporter to cover Bell’s campaign for school integration. He had his work cut out for him. White residents were busy changing boundary lines, rezoning school districts, and harassing local black families in order to undermine the desegregation effort. Bell told the Times that black residents of Leake County, Mississippi, faced threats of violence, eviction, and economic ruin, and had become afraid. One family, however, summoned the courage to send their six-year-old daughter for enrollment at a previously all-white school. Bell himself flew down from New York, took the child under his wing, and walked her to the schoolhouse on the first day, under the protection of fifty policemen, eighteen federal marshals, and nine FBI agents.21
In the courtroom, despite skepticism and outright hostility from many judges, Bell proved to be a persuasive litigator. Over the course of the summer, he won a series of victories in Clarksdale, Biloxi, and Jackson. The headlines in the Times captured the spirit of the moment: “Rural School in Mississippi Enrolls One Negro Girl Under Heavy Guard”;22 “Grade Schools in Mississippi Are Integrated”;23 “Integration Ordered by U.S. Judge Who Deplores It.”24 Mississippi had been the last holdout on desegregation—and Bell, the precocious child from Pittsburgh, helped force the state into compliance.
It was a remarkable triumph. The civil rights movement was changing the legal regime in the United States, down to the sprawling cotton country of the Mississippi Delta. There was a sense of optimism that pervaded all of the literature of the era. The courts had decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the legislature had passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965. Figures such as William Hastie believed that legal equality was the end of a long road—once blacks had attained full citizenship, they would finally reach the Promised Land.
But this turned out to be a false hope. As the 1960s came to a close, many activists felt the creeping realization that equality under the law would not lead easily to the equality of human conditions.
Bell, perhaps a bit dour by nature, began to see the entire enterprise as a bitter disappointment. In his memoirs, he recalls one moment in a courtroom in the Deep South, watching a judge treat Bell’s black clients with contempt and then, in the next breath, cheerily administer the oath of citizenship to a group of European immigrants. This was, in his own words, a “courthouse epiphany” that slashed down his faith in the movement.
“[The judge] asked the newly minted citizens to gather around the bench to be sworn in, then welcomed them to the country in tones of sweetness and warmth that were the Dr Jekyll opposite of the Mr Hyde treatment he’d been giving my clients for seeking the relief to which the Supreme Court had said they were entitled a decade earlier,” Bell recalled. “But that wasn’t what surprised me. What froze me in my seat, dumbfounded, was this realization: The moment these people became citizens, their whiteness made them more acceptable to this country, more a welcome part of it, than the black people I was representing would likely ever be. The realization pushed me to a moment of existential doubt: What was the point? Why was I trying to get children admitted to schools where they were not wanted and where—unless they were exceptional—they would probably fare poorly? Chances were good that they would drop out or be expelled for responding with anger or violence to the hostile treatment they were sure to receive.”25
These questions would haunt him for the rest of his life. The optimistic child who delivered the newspaper to the black professionals in his neighborhood had taken a tremendous blow. A new Derrick Bell, battered by experience and shorn of his youthful illusion, was born in the Mississippi floodplains. Years later, he returned to Leake County and visited a pair of sisters who had fought side by side with Bell during the struggle for integration and now felt the same underlying pessimism. “Looking back, I wonder whether I gave you the right advice,” Bell told them. “I also wondered whether that was the best way to go about it,” one responded. “It’s done now. We made it and we are still moving.”26
Bell, too, kept moving through his professional career. He had spent nearly a decade traveling through the Deep South and working in the trenches of civil rights law. Then, as the 1960s came to an end and his disillusionment with trial work reached its conclusion, he seized a new opportunity. A number of law schools, feeling pressure to recruit racial minorities onto the faculty, had reached out to Bell with offers of a teaching position. Soon enough, the golden ticket arrived: Harvard Law School wanted to make Bell its first full-time black professor.
He was, by his own admission, unqualified according to traditional standards. “When in the Spring of 1969 I accepted the Harvard Law School’s offer to join its faculty, both the school and I had reason to recognize that mine was a pioneering appointment, a mission really, that would mark a turning point in the school’s history,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The break in tradition was twofold. First, I would become the first full-time black teacher in Harvard’s one-hundred-fifty year history. Second, unlike virtually all of the faculty at that time, my qualifications did not include either graduation with distinction from a prestigious law school or a judicial clerkship on the Supreme Court. I had not, moreover, practiced with a major law firm where a well-known partner, himself a Harvard alumnus, was urging my appointment.”27
Bell understood the politics of racial hiring in elite institutions—a kind of proto–affirmative action—and saw it without illusion. “We must not forget, particularly those of us who are ‘first blacks,’ that our elections, appointments, and promotions were not based solely on our credentials, ability, or experience,” he said. “As important—likely more important—than merit is the fact that we came along at just the right time.”28
At Harvard, Bell worked to transform his disillusionment with the civil rights movement into a cohesive theory of race and power.
In 1973, he published his landmark casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law. The political orientation of the book was unmistakable: on the opening page, Bell reproduced the famous photograph of the two black sprinters raising the Black Power fist at the 1968 Olympics. The book, originally published for a limited audience of legal scholars, contained the entire seed of what would become known as “critical race theory.” Bell argued that race is “an indeterminate social construct that is continually reinvented and manipulated to maintain domination and enhance white privilege.” His goal was to examine “the law’s role in concretizing racial differences, maintaining racial inequality, and reifying the status quo”—and then to change it through the application of political power.29
Bell was dissatisfied with the regime of legal colorblindness and began searching for more radical solutions. He devoured the works of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci30 and Paulo Freire31—the latter of whom, by coincidence, was working at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at the same time that Bell was working at Harvard Law School—seeking to understand how societies replicate social control and how one could subvert those forces through institutional capture and radical education. Gramsci provided him with a theoretical framework for explaining how civil rights law, while appearing to help minorities, actually served the interests of white elites. Freire provided Bell with a theoretical justification for infusing his teaching with political activism.
In addition, Gramsci and Freire both validated Bell’s reflexive anti-capitalism. Since he was a child in Pittsburgh, Bell had always seen racism and capitalism as mutually interconnected. “Racism is more than just bad white folk hating black folk. It is the major underpinning of this capitalist society, of control of both blacks and whites,” he believed.32 This simplistic formulation would remain Bell’s basic political ideology for the rest of his life. “We live in this capitalist society,” he reiterated decades later, “that, by definition, means that some people are going to make a whole lot of money, gain a whole lot of power, by the exploitation of a whole lot of other people.”33
After years of this ferment, absorbing the radical literature and adapting to the privileges of tenure, Bell cobbled together a series of law review articles and fictional short stories that would coalesce into a grand theory of racial pessimism and mark the completion of Bell’s arc of disillusionment. “For many civil rights participants the decision in Brown represented not simply the fatal blow to Jim Crow statutes, but also a prescription for healing the racial wounds of the society,” Bell wrote.34 But that vision, he concluded, was an illusion. Whites could no longer maintain the structures of overt racism, but they had kept them alive through great cunning and subtlety, using ostensibly “colorblind” institutions to invisibly reproduce white domination.
“I contend that the decision in Brown to break with the court’s long-held position on these issues cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to whites,” Bell wrote, “not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policy making positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”35
Bell believed that white elites committed to civil rights in order to shore up their moral credibility against the Soviet Union, to appease black soldiers who expected equality after their service in the Second World War, and to accelerate the South’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. He called this phenomenon “interest convergence”: whites heralded advancements for blacks but, beneath their superficial appeals to freedom and equality, always secured their own material desires first. The superficial elements had changed over time, but the power structure remained the same.36
Bell came to see the entire post-Brown legal regime as a work of profound racial cynicism. After a generation of integration efforts, public schools had started to revert back to de facto racial separation, with black schools falling further and further behind.37 Whites could offload their guilt by pointing to civil rights legislation and de jure legal equality without having to sacrifice any of their economic or political privileges. As he later wrote, white elites had “rewir[ed] the rhetoric of equality”38 in order to preserve the substance of white supremacy.
Also, in Bell’s interpretation, blacks provided America with an eternal scapegoat. As he developed his theory over the years, Bell went so far as to argue that American democracy itself was predicated on maintaining capitalist domination through racial control. “Racism is not an anomaly, but a crucial component of liberal democracy in this country,” he wrote. “The extreme inequality of property and wealth in America is the direct result of the historic and continuing willingness of a great many, perhaps most, white people to identify with and attempt to emulate those at the top of the economic heap while comforting their likely permanent lowly state by disidentifying and refusing to join with blacks and other people of color.”39
The mark of Bell’s full conversion came in the mid-1980s. He had been putting together the premise of his argument since his first years at Harvard Law School. But the culmination of his intellectual transformation came with a surprising twist: he abandoned the conventions of legal academic writing and embraced creative fiction as a new method of argumentation.
The catalyst for Bell’s narrative turn was an invitation to write the foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s 1984 Supreme Court volume, the most prestigious page-space in the academic legal world. Bell felt anxious about writing a scholarly article. Instead, he proposed writing four fictional stories on the theme of race and the law. “I wanted to write about race, but to write about it in the strictly legal stuff with thousands of footnotes was just going to be boring. And the editors said, ‘You know, if you did one of those kinds of things, it would be mediocre, but it wouldn’t matter,’” he recalled. “‘But if you’re going to write this fiction, we [would be very excited about that].’ They helped me and we worked very hard and that was the beginning, because it was [the] first time ever—and probably the last time ever—that the Harvard Law Review Foreword would be basically four allegorical stories.”40
The editors, including future Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan,41 helped Bell deliver on his desire to “appraise the contradictions and inconsistencies that pervade the all too real world of racial oppression” using “the tools not only of reason but of unreason, of fantasy.”42 Through these stories, Bell was able to dispatch with academic requirements and present his theory of racial pessimism in raw, emotionally loaded narratives.
The stories themselves—“The Chronicle of the Celestial Curia,” “The Chronicle of the DeVine Gift,” “The Chronicle of the Amber Cloud,” and “The Chronicle of the Slave Scrolls”—were simple racial allegories: the spirits of three mystical black women explain how the liberal welfare state will never lead to substantive equality; a black hair product executive provides funding for minority law professors, but white administrators refuse to hire beyond a token population; a mysterious cloud infects white children with the social pathologies of the black ghetto, but white legislators refuse to provide the cure to black children; a pastor discovers magical scrolls in Africa that will lift American blacks out of poverty, but jealous whites force him to burn the scrolls in the bottom of a wooden ship.
The didactic lessons are anything but subtle. Bell portrays whites as ruthless exploiters who take pleasure in the permanent subordination of black America. After the fall of slavery and segregation, Bell contends, whites have cynically used civil rights laws, welfare policies, affirmative action, and colorblindness to create a “mirage” of equality, while secretly doing “all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain their control.”43 The standard narrative of racial progress, Bell claimed, was little more than a racial myth designed to absolve whites of historical responsibility and to lull blacks into present-day complacency. Meanwhile, the actual behavior of whites was as vicious as ever. They would gleefully withhold, delay, and burn any mechanism for black progress.
As he wrote in his Chronicles, the promise of equality was always a ruse. The real history of the United States was one long parade of horrors from the origins of the country to the present day. In Bell’s historical revision, the framers of the Constitution “were unable to imagine a society in which whites and Negroes would live together as fellow-citizens,” “the Emancipation Proclamation was intended to serve the interests of the Union, not the blacks,” “the Civil War amendments [to the Constitution] actually furthered the goals of northern industry and politics far better and longer than they served to protect even the most basic rights of the freedmen,” and the social movement that achieved the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act “must be seen as part of the American racial fantasy.”44
Bell’s political vision was an infinite recursion: whiteness was the invisible poison that turned every victory into defeat. His stories were loaded with bitterness, and yet, because of their placement in the Harvard Law Review, they sparked immediate controversy and interest.
Despite his lifelong insistence that he did “not care to write in ways that whites can vindicate,”45 Bell suddenly became a star among the white intelligentsia, which has always had an affinity for messages of white racism and American evil. He went on radio and television expounding his unitary theory of racial catastrophe. A major publisher bought the rights to Bell’s Chronicles and asked him to expand them into a series of books that would become And We Are Not Saved and Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Both would become New York Times bestsellers, and the latter included a story that was optioned and turned into a film by the premium cable outlet HBO.
Bell’s relentless pessimism was turned into a brand—and he chased it for the rest of his life. He had become the great misanthropist, the great prophet of doom, and, completing the reversal from his younger life, abandoned all hope in “the nation’s long-held myth of equality.”46 Thus the pattern was set: the gloomier his work, the greater his influence; the more apocalyptic his conclusions, the greater his prestige.
“Racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,” he thundered. “The racism that made slavery feasible is far from dead in the last decade of twentieth-century America.”47 Indeed, Bell warned, it could return. American whites were so depraved, they might even put people like him back in chains. “Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”48
There was no turning back. Bell had created a nightmare that captured the imagination of the Left. He was moving toward the height of his power—his fame and his cynicism were growing in tandem—and he wanted to exert it. He looked around him, seething at the state of the nation and the complicity of the institutions, and prepared himself to achieve, if not equality, then revenge.