“I Live to Harass White Folks”
The Politics of Eternal Resentment
Derrick Bell had all the trappings of academic success—a tenured professorship at Harvard, publications in the prestigious law reviews, a coterie of students at his feet—but he wanted more. By his own description, Bell was not a traditional scholar, but an activist with an eye toward real-world application.
Bell had spent the 1980s in a state of restlessness, building his ideology, experimenting with activist campaigns, and refining his techniques. He left Harvard in 1980 to become dean of the University of Oregon Law School, then quit after the university refused to hire an Asian-American woman. Next he taught for a year at Stanford Law School, where students complained that his courses were steeped in ideology rather than constitutional theory,1 and, finally, he rejoined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1986. He had grown disillusioned with the possibility of reform through the democratic process, but he had discovered the potential for a new strategy: reshaping the manners and mores of elite institutions.
The revolution did not run through the streets, Bell concluded, but through the faculty meeting and the seminar room.
Over the years, Bell had fashioned himself into a Paulo Freire–style “liberationist teacher”2 who recruited students into campus politics. According to one of Bell’s disciples, the law professor Charles Lawrence III, Bell and his students imagined that they were the modern equivalents of the “field hands, blacksmiths, and conductors on the Underground Railroad”3 and had a duty to subvert the “traditional white-male model”4 of education and begin “replacing those ideologies and practices with ones that liberate us.”5
Student radicals followed him wherever he went and solicited his involvement in campus protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations. “For [Bell] the classroom is not just a stage or podium, it is a place to tell and listen to stories, a spawning ground for new ideas, a laboratory, a workshop for theory building,” recalled Lawrence. “Derrick Bell’s classes are ‘healing groups,’ where Black minds, and the minds of those who choose to join our cause in solidarity, are ‘decolonized.’ They are ‘war rooms’ where the strategies for the struggle are conceived and from whence political battles are launched. As a ‘first’ at Harvard, it has fallen to Professor Bell to frame a paradigm for liberationist pedagogy, a methodology for we teachers of color who find ourselves thrust by necessity into the vanguard of the struggle.”6
The other left-wing faculty in Bell’s orbit soon joined in the fight. In a feature-length essay for City Journal, the writer Heather Mac Donald captured a sense of how this vaunted “liberationist pedagogy” expressed itself in the classroom. These theorists, Mac Donald observed, followed the line of argument that “law is merely a mask for white male power” and attacked what they saw as “illegitimate hierarchies,” which included nearly every facet of the liberal order, including legal neutrality, limited government, and private property. In practice, the professors of this new approach, which went by the name “critical legal studies” before getting absorbed into “critical race theory,” turned their classes into a “forum for white-bashing,” unleashing tremendous personal hostility toward white students under the pretext of legal criticism.
“I was going home crying every day,” said one white female student. “No matter what I said, the response was: you don’t know because you’re white. Some students wouldn’t speak to me after class. It scared me, because I thought I was this big liberal, and I was treated like the devil.”7
Relations between faculty members were no better. As the critical legal scholars and their allies made their initial blitz, one professor began to describe Harvard Law as “the Beirut of legal education,” with rival factions seeking to undermine one another. The critical legal theorists and, after them, the critical race theorists were the ones who had the upper hand. They understood the power of racial politics and knew that capturing prestige institutions such as Harvard would set the precedent for elite discourse down the line. “There’s a peculiar kind of vanity or megalomania at Harvard, that the place is the soul of the American ruling class,” one professor told the New York Times during the conflict. “Whoever wins in local institutional battles there thinks they will control America’s cultural and institutional destiny.”8
Bell was ready to lead the effort.
When he returned to Harvard in 1986, Bell’s primary demand was that the university hire additional left-wing racialists onto the faculty.9 He made public appeals to “diversity” and “affirmative action,” but the unspoken gambit, which was obvious to outside observers at the time, was to stack the faculty with ideological allies who would help Bell collapse the foundations of traditional legal theory and replace them with the tenets of what would become known as critical race theory. He staged protests, directed student demonstrations, and sought additional leverage by threatening to quit if his demands were not met. He calculated that, as the first affirmative action hire at Harvard Law School, he had significant symbolic power and, by creating a scene, he could damage the university’s reputation. As his wife reminded him, “Harvard needs us more than we need Harvard.”10
In 1987, Bell announced a four-day sit-in to support two critical race scholars who had been denied tenure. Then, three years later, he took his strategy to the brink, writing a letter to the administration and the faculty announcing that he was going on strike until the law school hired and tenured a black woman. He worked with student activists to organize rallies and negotiate exclusive coverage in the New York Times.
Bell and his students demanded that the university hire visiting professor Regina Austin, a critical race theorist who was known for writing inflammatory polemics, denouncing the “white man’s racist, sexist comic imagination,” celebrating the stereotype of the “Black Bitch,” and telling her black female colleagues that “the time has come for us to get truly hysterical.”11
These qualities were rare among legal scholars, but they made Austin the perfect candidate for Bell’s activism. Austin brought with her a reputation of being a strict enforcer of racial politics. She knew how to wield the concept of “diversity” as both a shield and a sword, coming down hard on colleagues and students who dissented from her views. “The problem is, you can’t tell the truth around here anymore without being accused of being a racist,” one of her students told the Times.12
During this period, Bell also used his writing to ratchet up the pressure on the administration. He argued that the tenure process at Harvard was a racist system, selecting for the status quo and excluding most black candidates.
In his fictionalized writing, he pushed the boundaries even further. As the faculty wars heated up, Bell wrote a long story for the Michigan Law Review, later republished in Faces at the Bottom of the Well, that began with the explosion of a “huge, nuclearlike fireball”13 on the Harvard campus, killing the university president and all 196 of the university’s black faculty and staff. In the story, many whites assumed that black faculty members, desperate at the slow pace of affirmative action, had enacted a “bizarre murder-suicide pact”14 to become martyrs for the cause. Blacks, on the other hand, were convinced that “ultraconservatives, possibly acting with government support,”15 had detonated the bomb in a racial assassination plot. Investigators sifted through the ashes and found a diversity report, revealing the dismal whiteness that continued to reign among Harvard faculty.
The lesson of the story, according to Bell, was that the university was a racist institution that had formalized a “black tokenism policy” that amounted to: “Hire one if you must, but only one.”16 The purpose of his writing, he suggested, was to “shame those high-level white folks”17 into expanding diversity hiring—which, in the fictional narrative, they did.
But in reality, the story caused frustration among Bell’s colleagues at Harvard. Bell had called the university a “plantation”18 and directly fantasized about the murder of the university president—a crude and vengeful representation of Bell’s own vitriol toward his colleagues.
This time, Bell had gone too far. After his strike on behalf of Regina Austin and lurid assassination fantasies, the administration decided that it would no longer submit to the professor’s racial blackmail campaign. The university dispatched Professor Roger Fisher, who led the Harvard Negotiating Project and had brokered complex peace agreements in the Middle East,19 but the negotiations went nowhere.20 Bell was intransigent. He was at the height of his fame and power and, playing into the role of the martyr, he refused to budge.
And so, the administration iced him out. Law school dean Robert Clark would not to concede to Bell’s pressure campaign and university president Neil Rudenstine refused to meet directly with Bell during the negotiations. Bell spent the next two years on unpaid leave, continuing his demands and rallying students who took over the dean’s office and denounced administrators as complicit in racism and sexism.21
But after a few months of theatrics, the public lost interest. Bell had been using these tactics for a decade and the university finally called his bluff. Harvard’s policy at the time was that professors could not take more than two years of unpaid leave. As the timeline expired, Bell made last-minute demands to meet with the university’s governing board.
The administration summoned Bell to an appeal hearing at 17 Quincy Street. “The University did not relish a hearing at which students might mount protests. Instead, the president’s office arranged for a small group of the members of the Corporation and the Board of Overseers to meet with me in late July,” Bell wrote in his memoirs. “Ironically, this was the same building that, in my fictional protest story, was mysteriously blown up, killing the university president and all the black faculty members and finally inspiring the school to launch a major effort to recruit minority candidates. Perhaps University officials remembered my story, for on the morning of the hearing, uniformed and plainclothes security personnel were visibly present around the building.”22
Bell made his case, but administrators were unmoved. They attended the meeting, processed the paperwork, and fired him. Shortly after he was let go, Bell sat for a profile in the New York Times, which called him a “devoutly angry man” who had nothing but contempt for Harvard and all that it represented. Bell blamed administrators and his former colleagues, including the five black law school professors who failed to support his one-man suicide mission. He also confided that he had launched his protest as his wife, Jewel, was dying of breast cancer and conceded, with a tinge of shame, that he had doubts that his “protests were entirely praiseworthy.”23
The only consolation, Bell later wrote, was that he had caused distress for his white colleagues. “I was disappointed, but also amused—as blacks are from time to time—when we recognize how easy it is to frighten whites, notwithstanding the fact that they hold all the power.”24
After this progression of tragedy, failure, and disruption, Bell’s pessimism hardened. During his leave of absence, Bell had secured another professorship at New York University. His writing and teaching became even more cynical, advancing the arguments that America is an irredeemably racist nation, that whites are carriers of immense evil, and that blacks in America risk genocide and extermination.
In an acidic mixture of revisionism and personal grappling, Bell sought to rewrite American history as a long sequence of gloom and oppression. He wrote fictional stories attacking Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as racist hypocrites.25 He made the case that the Constitution was not a “hallowed document,”26 but a self-serving compact that protected the interests of whites who controlled massive “investments in land, slaves, manufacturing, and shipping.”27
In his lectures at NYU, Bell told students that the Constitution was a useless document, because the Supreme Court would always manipulate the law to serve elite interests, then appeal to the Constitution after the fact. “When I was a kid, we had cockroaches in the house, but we didn’t have roach powder,” Bell told his students. “So we killed the roaches by stomping on them. What the Justices do is stomp on the roaches, and then spray them with roach powder. The Constitution is like the roach powder.”28
For Bell, the real story of American history was that of a racial conspiracy, with white elites manipulating racial hatred to maintain their monopoly on wealth and power. This dynamic was established at the Founding and has continued without deviation ever since. “The involuntary servitude of black rights to white property interests is the basic explanation for the slavery of the past and the continuing subordinate status of black people today,” Bell wrote.29
Bell believed that the entire arc of America’s racial history—from the Declaration to the Emancipation to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Civil Rights Act—appeared to be in the service of freedom for blacks but, in actuality, served the self-interest of elite whites. The Founders signed the Declaration of Independence not to establish the grounds of universal freedom, Bell argued, but to use the profits of slavery to enrich themselves at the direct and conscious expense of blacks.30 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation not to free the slaves, but “to win the war and preserve the Union.”31 Legislators enacted the Fourteenth Amendment not to extended citizenship and equal protection under the law, but as a mechanism to secretly protect the fortunes of the great robber barons of the railroads, utilities, banks, and vested interests.32 Even the Civil Rights Act, in Bell’s revisionist history, provided only a fig leaf of colorblind equality while, in truth, entrenching and legitimizing existing racial inequalities.33
Bell argued that American blacks in the modern era were worse off than at any other time since slavery. “From the very beginning of this nation, blacks have been the exploited, the excluded, and often the exterminated in this society,” says one of Bell’s fictional characters in And We Are Not Saved. “For most of that time, racial policies were blatant, vicious, and horribly damaging, leaving most of us in a subordinate status when compared with all but the lowest whites. And now that the Court has, as a result of our ceaseless petitions, been forced to find that overt discrimination is unconstitutional, we are for all intents and purposes still maintained in a subordinate state by the so-called neutral policies of a still-racist society because—for God’s sake—we are not white!”34
Bell made no attempt to conceal his own racial animosity. In fact, as his notoriety grew, he expressed it in more direct and cutting terms. His two most famous texts, Faces at the Bottom of the Well and And We Are Not Saved, can, to a certain extent, be described as book-length fantasies of white depravity. In Bell’s imagination, whites are uniformly cruel, selfish, sadistic, exploitative, and evil. In one of his stories, he wrote that many whites would gladly pay a 3 percent income tax for a “racial preferences license” that allowed them to openly discriminate against blacks and resegregate their neighborhoods, businesses, and schools.35 In another, he wrote that whites secretly enabled black crime in order to profit from the management of prisons, courts, and law enforcement, using the “fear of black crime” to provide a stabilizing mechanism for society.36
From his perch at NYU, Bell even endorsed the notorious anti-Semite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. “Minister Farrakhan is perhaps the best living example of a black man ready, willing, and able to ‘tell it like it is’ regarding who is responsible for racism in this country,” Bell said. “In this regard, he’s easily a match for all those condescending white talk-show hosts who consider themselves very intelligent, certainly smarter than any black man. . . . Minister Farrakhan, calm, cool, and very much on top of the questions, handles these self-appointed guardians with ease. I love it!”37
Bell’s most famous story, “The Space Traders,”38 contains the cynical heart of his new politics. The narrative begins on the first day of the year 2000 as a flotilla of glimmering spaceships arrives along the Atlantic coastline from Massachusetts to North Carolina. The leader of the alien force descends from the bow of one of the ships and speaks to the American people in a voice simulating Ronald Reagan. He offers a deal to the human delegation: the aliens will provide America with enough gold, anti-pollutant chemicals, and nuclear fuel to clear the national debt and provide a permanent source of clean energy; in exchange, the aliens want to take all of the country’s black citizens back to their home star.
In Bell’s story, the racial politics of American society had grown dire. Laissez-faire economics, welfare dependency, AIDS, and rampant crime had devastated the black community. The white power structure had put blacks in inner-city concentration camps, with high walls and armed guards controlling the entrances and exits. “Young blacks escaped from time to time to terrorize whites. Long dead was the dream that this black underclass would ever ‘overcome,’” Bell wrote.39 The American public was split into two camps. White conservatives warmed to the deal because it would cut government costs. The business lobby opposed it, as “most business leaders understood that blacks were crucial in stabilizing the economy with its ever-increasing disparity between the incomes of rich and poor.”40
Ultimately, legislators came to a consensus, passing a constitutional amendment to authorize the trade and sending it to the people for a referendum vote. “The Framers intended America to be a white country,” the pro-trade group told the public. “After more than a hundred and thirty-seven years of good-faith efforts to build a healthy, stable interracial nation, we have concluded—as the Framers did in the beginning—that our survival today requires that we sacrifice the rights of blacks in order to protect and further the interests of whites. The Framers’ example must be our guide. Patriotism, and not pity, must govern our decision. We should ratify the amendment and accept the Space Traders’ proposition.”41
On voting day, 70 percent of Americans cast their ballots in favor of sending the black population into the void.
At dawn on Martin Luther King Day, the alien ships unloaded their treasures and opened their hatches for boarding. “Crowded on the beaches were the inductees, some twenty million silent black men, women, and children, including babes in arms,” Bell wrote. “As the sun rose, the Space Traders directed them, first, to strip off all but a single undergarment; then, to line up; and finally, to enter those holds which yawned in the morning light like Milton’s ‘darkness visible.’ The inductees looked fearfully behind them. But, on the dunes above the beaches, guns at the ready, stood U.S. guards. There was no escape, no alternative. Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived.”42
The most profitable interpretation of Bell’s work is not as literature, but as psychodrama. He did not have the mind of a novelist—his themes and characters were polemical, rather than human, representations—but the mind of a lawyer who had fallen into despair. The most compelling characters in Derrick Bell’s stories are not the Founding Fathers or the Space Traders, but Derrick Bell himself. The blizzard of dark emotions in his fiction—the hatred, pessimism, inferiority, terror—are inseparable from the biographical details of the author. The underlying theme of all of his stories—the innate and unchangeable corruption of white America—represents the writer’s deepest conclusion about the country of his birth.
In his memoirs, Bell revealed the psychological motivation behind his work as an author and an activist. “At its essence, the willingness to protest represents less a response to a perceived affront than the acting out of a state of mind,” he wrote. “Often, the desire to change the offending situation which is beyond our reach may be an incidental benefit and not the real motivation. Rather, those of us who speak out are moved by a deep sense of the fragility of our self-worth. It is the determination to protect our sense of who we are that leads us to risk criticism, alienation, and serious loss while most others, similarly harmed, remain silent. Protest that can rescue self-esteem is of special value to black Americans in a society where overt discrimination and unconscious acts of racial domination pose a continual threat to both well-being and mental health.”43
On the surface, Bell had reached the height of professional achievement. He was a successful civil rights lawyer and the first tenured African-American professor at Harvard Law School. But he was plagued with self-doubt. He once confided to his second wife, Janet Dewart Bell, that he “had a lot of nerve to think that he could be the first tenured black professor at Harvard.”44 He was deeply self-conscious about his lack of traditional legal credentials45 and told the New York Times he never felt accepted by his peers.46
This contradiction led to a bipolar reaction. Bell retreated into racial pessimism at the same time that he lashed out in symbolic rage. He sought validation from the same institutions that he despised. He fantasized about the murder of his colleagues and was outraged that they rejected him. “Being black in America means we are ever the outsiders,” he wrote. “As such, we are expendable and must live always at risk of some ultimate betrayal by those who will treat such treachery as a right.”47
The conservative black economist Thomas Sowell, whom Bell had attacked as a race traitor,48 offered an explanation of Bell’s predicament. “Derrick Bell was for years a civil-rights lawyer, but not an academic legal scholar of the sort who gets appointed as a full professor at one of the leading law schools. Yet he became a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and was a full professor at Harvard Law School. It was transparently obvious in both cases that his appointment was because he was black, not because he had the qualifications that got other people appointed to these faculties,” Sowell said. “Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars—or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond. His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose.”
And this path, in Sowell’s view, was a tragic turn. Bell’s “previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil-rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.”49
Seen through this lens, Bell’s bluster was a cover for his self-doubt. His assault on colorblindness, meritocracy, and tenure was a justification for his own position. His hatred for his colleagues was a preemption against personal rejection. The problems of Derrick Bell were not the problems of the black ghetto—they were the problems of the affirmative action hire in the elite institution.
Yet, in a cruel irony, the very structures that Bell condemned incentivized his pessimism. His stories served an important political function: Bell was a high-prestige black intellectual who sold a narrative of white evil, which delighted left-wing audiences, especially white liberals in positions of influence, who rewarded Bell with fame, wealth, and prestige. His bipolar reaction—attack and retreat, fury and resignation—built into a tremendous tension. He hated them as much as he needed them. He sought rejection as much as he sought approval.
Bell never escaped this negativity spiral. As the 1990s turned to the 2000s, his signature pessimism devolved into paranoia. He developed a verbal tic, often prefacing his sentences in media interviews with variations on the phrase, “Maybe I’m getting a little racially paranoid.”50
He was. Bell’s worldview had grown darker and darker as the years passed. His characterizations descended into caricature. His insights turned into clichés.
As the demand for his pessimism grew, the lines of his thought terminated on a preposterous judgment: whites in America were so hateful and sadistic, Bell believed, that they were on the verge of exterminating blacks altogether. He fantasized that heavily armed white supremacists were hunting him down in the woods. “What do I find? A nigger and his nigger-lovin’ white woman,” said one of Bell’s fictional characters, a “far-right paramilitary type” who threatened to march Bell and his companion to his command outpost, where they would be imprisoned, tortured, or killed.51 Blacks were at such great risk of persecution, Bell wrote, that there was a growing movement to build a “nationwide network of secret shelters to house and feed black people in the event of a black holocaust or some other all-out attack on America’s historic scapegoats.”52 His language verged into the catastrophic: “holocaust,” “genocide,” and “extermination.”53
These apocalyptic views cannot be dismissed as mere fictionalizations. Bell truly believed—or, at least, had convinced himself to believe—that, given the opportunity, whites would enact unimaginable brutalities against blacks. In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air shortly after “The Space Traders” was published, Bell told host Terry Gross he believed that, in real life, Americans would vote to permanently expel blacks from the universe, just as they had in his stories. “Civil rights measures always go down to defeat in popular referenda,” he said matter-of-factly, pointing out that, during his public lectures, most whites and virtually all blacks told him that their communities would vote for the space trade.54 In a law review article published in response to critics, Bell speculated that the United States might even commit “racial genocide” and eliminate blacks on a mass basis.55
Bell had long insisted that American society was a wasteland that forced blacks into unemployment, poverty, addiction, broken homes, and social anarchy. Their only function was as a scapegoat that stabilized relations between the white socioeconomic classes. But in the modern economy, he feared, even this function might not be necessary anymore.
Following the publication of Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Bell engaged in a dialogue with another professor, Sidney Willhelm, who suggested that blacks had become economically superfluous and, therefore, faced an “ever-growing danger of genocide.”56 Slaves had been necessary for their labor, Willhelm reasoned, but now that regular work had disappeared from the inner cities, the black underclass did not even serve as exploitation. Bell sympathized with this line of thought and linked it with his long-standing belief in the permanence of racism.
“Are African Americans locked into a permanently racist society and can developments in that society be leading toward their extermination?” Bell asked. “I cannot answer either question with proof that would satisfy you. Nor can I convince you that past experience leads me, without more, to know that I am right about racism and right to fear that Professor Willhelm is right as well. What is clear is that black Americans are now, as were our forebears when they were brought to the New World, objects of barter for those who, while profiting from our existence, deny our humanity.”57
Bell was ready to make the final leap. He peered over the precipice, saw nothing but racism, carnage, and destruction—and jumped.
For the last decades of his life, Bell frequently told a story that illustrated the endpoint of his philosophy. “The year was 1964. It was a quiet, heat-hushed evening in Harmony, a small, black community near the Mississippi Delta. Some Harmony residents, in the face of increasing white hostility, were organizing to ensure implementation of a court order mandating desegregation of their schools the next September. Walking with Mrs. Biona MacDonald, one of the organizers, up a dusty, unpaved road toward her modest home, I asked where she found the courage to continue working for civil rights in the face of intimidation that included her son losing his job in town, the local bank trying to foreclose on her mortgage, and shots fired through her living room window,” Bell recalled. “‘Derrick,’ she said slowly, seriously, ‘I am an old woman. I lives to harass white folks.’”58
This simple phrase became Bell’s personal motto. “Mrs. MacDonald did not say she risked everything because she hoped or expected to win out over the whites who, as she well knew, held all the economic and political power, and the guns as well. Rather, she recognized that—powerless as she was—she had, and intended to use, courage and determination as weapons ‘to harass white folks,’” he wrote. “Mrs. MacDonald did not even hint that her harassment would topple whites’ well-entrenched power. Rather, her goal was defiance and its harassing effect was more potent precisely because she placed herself in confrontation with her oppressors with full knowledge of their power and willingness to use it. . . . Mrs. MacDonald understood twenty-five years ago the theory that I am espousing in the 1990s for black leaders and civil rights lawyers to adopt. If you remember her story, you will understand my message.”59
The story contains the basic themes of Bell’s work: the retreat into fatalism, the symbolic lashing out. But, seen from another angle, the story also illustrates Bell’s own tragic shortcomings. Mrs. MacDonald was a poor black woman born into the segregated South; Derrick Bell was a Harvard professor at the height of legal and professional power. The old woman’s noble dignity becomes, in the hands of Derrick Bell, an abdication. The professor refused to acknowledge any progress. He imagined himself no better off than Mrs. MacDonald and explained away all black success as ultimately serving the interests of white elites.
Bell had made a fetish out of white evil and black despair. He turned his provocative theory of racial pessimism into a bottomless pit of racial nihilism. The young lawyer, fighting against Jim Crow in a pressed suit, had succumbed to his own cynicism and paranoia. He could not prove that racism was eternal or that black genocide was imminent, but his fears provided enough justification to believe it.
In the epigraph to Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Bell summarized his ultimate vision of society. “Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well,” he wrote. “Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us. Surely, they must know that their deliverance depends on letting down their ropes. Only by working together is escape possible. Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment to keeping us where we are, at whatever cost to them or to us.”60
No hope, no progress, no transcendence.
The economist Thomas Sowell described Bell’s philosophical descent in blunt terms. “He’s turned his back on the ideal of a colorblind society and he’s really for a getting-even society, a revenge society,” Sowell said. “It’s particularly ironic in the case of Bell because, at one point in his career, he fought against racism. And now he seems to have metamorphosed into someone who thinks that racism should not be eliminated, but simply put under new management.”61
Sowell was right. Bell had abandoned the idea that the United States could transcend racism. He was focused entirely on attacking that society, undermining its self-confidence, and exacting psychological revenge. This question—what should be done with the eternally racist system of the United States—was Bell’s final contribution to the history of American legal theory. Although he did not provide a comprehensive answer himself—he was, after all, a critic rather than a builder—he created the space for his students to follow.
In time, a small group of Bell’s disciples, moving from a circle at Harvard into positions at legal academies across the country, would turn their master’s insights into a working program of scholarship and activism. They would call their project “critical race theory”—and change the face of American society in the new century.