Derrick Bell believed his country had fallen (Steve Liss/Getty Images)

The Karl Marx of critical race theory was a bespectacled, mild-mannered man with a slightly whimsical voice. Born a year after Martin Luther King Jr, Derrick Bell became the first black American to be a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. It should never have happened: neither of his parents attended college, and Bell himself had studied at the relatively undistinguished Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Today, his central argument, that racism is a permanent feature of American society, is now mainstream.
Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. Itâs not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And itâs not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.
For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.
In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery â or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places â but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that âseparate but equalâ public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment â which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens âequal protection of the lawsâ. If black Americans have separate schooling, they canât realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:
âvalue to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.â
In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War â and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.
But Bellâs critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws donât change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. âMy positionâ, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, âis that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) ⌠but deifiedâ. This is because âthe worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hopeâ.
Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latterâs second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.
âI think,â he writes, âweâve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefitâ. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.
This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obamaâs presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwinâs successor â the nationâs intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.
Coates isnât a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bellâs critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of Americaâs identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. âThere is nothingâ, Coates writes about racists, âuniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacyâ.
Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: âI have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spiritualsâ. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. âAmericaâ, Coates writes, âunderstands itself as Godâs handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of menâ. He is an atheist.
Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:
âhumanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognitionâ.
So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are âpassion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humilityâ. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?
Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Departmentâs Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldnât be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.
One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell â the moralist and the pessimist â is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin â nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldnât try to be better.
But perhaps a better way to account for this tension â a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates â is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.
Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. âOne cannotâ, he writes, âat once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal errorâ. His proposal is this: âto take our countrymenâs claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standardâ. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).
Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to â or at least inconsistent with â America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theoryâs contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right â in this case, Christopher Rufo â now complain that critical race theory has âpervaded every aspect of the federal governmentâ and poses âan existential threat to the United Statesâ. Rufo and his ilk arenât opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.
The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realistâs ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nationâs self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughesâs: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.
Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation â while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.
This piece was originally published in August.
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