Derrick Bell, Race Radical.

March 8, 2012 in Access, History, Litigation, Police, Politics, Race, Violence | by | 9 comments

The Breitbart machine’s attempt to smear President Obama for his 1990 embrace of civil rights activist and legal theorist Derrick Bell is an act of cynical, craven maliciousness. There was nothing covert about Obama’s support for Bell, nothing hidden about a video clip that appeared on television during the 2008 campaign and has remained online ever since. It’s a ginned up non-story grounded in a long list of lies and distortions.

Which is a shame not least because Bell is a figure around whom real, important arguments could easily be built. A civil rights lawyer who grew skeptical of the Brown vs. Board of Ed decision, a Harvard Law professor who wrote an agitprop sci-fi story that was adapted into a schlocky HBO production, Bell was a strange and complicated man. His views on race and justice were contrarian, pessimistic, and deeply unsettling to those — of any race — who regard the project of achieving American racial equality as having entered its mopping-up phase.

I’ve been going back and reading (often re-reading) some of Bell’s writings since this story broke yesterday, and I’ve been struck again and again by his ability to provoke and to unsettle. Take for instance his characterization, from a 1998 book review, of black people as living “at the mercy of a criminal justice system that unapologetically prefers and protects whites.”

It’s the “unapologetically” that inflicts the real pain there — a defiant, hostile characterization that seems designed to provoke defensiveness and dismissal. But the word is crucial to his larger argument, because it characterizes our society as one in which racism is not vestigial but essential. Racism, to Bell, wasn’t peripheral to American identity, but ingrained deeply within it, and if one did not acknowledge that reality, one’s efforts to combat it were bound to fail, and fail in shoddy, pathetic ways.

Bell’s critics often accused him of proceeding by assertion rather than argumentation, and there’s merit to that complaint. The “unapologetically” in that sentence is offered as a fact, not a hypothesis, and the casualness with which it is deployed renders it difficult to respond to. How would one prove that Bell was wrong? By offering examples of white American racial apology? By pointing to instances of liberal hand-wringing over racial abuses? Any attempt to engage seems to lead to entanglement, and Bell has no interest in finding a congenial middle ground.

But what he’s up to is something far more interesting than mere assertion, even in the parables that have drawn so much mockery. (Evidence of their confounding power can be found in the fact that they reduced a scholar as cogent as Richard Posner to the ugly and spluttering claim that they “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.”) No, the project Bell is engaged in is the construction of an alternate reality, a brick-by-brick dismantling of received notions of how things are, to be replaced with a new way of seeing. Facts are important to this project, but Bell is mostly uninterested in arguing over facts — he proceeds from the premise that the facts are undisputed, and that it’s the interpretation of those facts that’s at issue.

Take this, from the piece I quoted above. Addressing the question of whether it is “proper to use a person’s race as a proxy for an increased likelihood of criminal misconduct,” Bell notes that from the dawn of slavery to the days of Korematsu, “the law’s answer was clearly, yes.”

He goes on:

“Affirmative action is under tremendous pressure politically and legally because whites claim they are innocent victims of policies that penalize them for the misconduct of others who also happen to be white. As a result, the Supreme Court has severely limited those programs by requiring that they meet the exacting standards of strict scrutiny. But the Court has approved race-based police stops with barely a mention of the harm suffered by innocent blacks or Mexican-Americans who look like suspects who also happen to be black or Latino. This inconsistency is not an aberration but part of a long-standing pattern to shape legal standards to protect whites when such protection can be achieved at the expense of blacks.”

“This inconsistency is not an aberration.” That phrase, that idea, constitutes the heart of Derrick Bell’s analysis of race and law in the United States.

Video Shows Law Student Obama Introducing Professor Derrick Bell at 1990 Campus Rally

March 7, 2012 in Campus Protests, Faculty, History, Organizing, Politics, Race, Teaching | by | 8 comments

Update | Much more about Derrick Bell.

•          •          •

Video has surfaced from a speech President Obama gave at a campus rally in 1990, the first of a series of videos that conservative activist Andrew Breitbart claimed would reveal the president’s true radicalism to the American people.

Only a little over a minute of the speech has appeared so far, but Breitbart’s website promises “additional footage that has been hidden by Obama’s allies in the mainstream media and academia” is yet to come.

In today’s video, Obama — then a 29-year-old Harvard law student — is seen introducing Harvard professor Derrick Bell, who had taken an unpaid leave from the law school to protest the absence of women of color from its tenured faculty ranks. Bell, who had been a prominent civil rights lawyer in the 1960s, was the school’s first black tenured professor and a prominent scholar in the field of critical race theory.

Here’s the clip, followed by a transcript and a bit more background.


Obama:

“And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first year students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front, and not giving us a lecture but engaging us in a conversation. And speaking the truth, and telling us that he [cut] to learn of this place that I’ve carried with me ever since. Now how did this one man do all this? How has he accomplished all this? He hasn’t done it simply by his good looks and easy charm, although he has both in ample measure. He hasn’t done it simply because of the excellence of his scholarship, although his scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons, and changed the standards of what legal writing is about. [cut] Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”

In a February 9 speech Breitbart, who died unexpectedly on March 1, said that he was going to “vet” the president with videos “from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out.”

After alluding to Obama’s relationship with “silver ponytails” like former Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dorhn and Bill Ayers, Breitbart said that when Obama was at Harvard “he was advocating for the worst of the worst to join the faculty. Radicals. Radicals at Beiruit on the Charles.” (If Breitbart’s “worst of the worst” reference was to Professor Bell, he was taking some liberties with the timeline — Bell was hired by Harvard in 1969, when Obama was seven years old. He was tenured there in 1971, left in 1980, and returned in 1986, two years before Obama enrolled.)

All should be revealed soon, however, as the Breitbart people say they’ll play the “full tape” on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show tonight. I’ll be watching, and I’ll update this post if anything interesting turns up.

Update | PBS’s Frontline website has posted what it says is the “full archived tape” of the speech as recorded and edited by local affiliate WBGH in 1990. Though no additional portions of Obama’s speech appear on that tape, which consists of 4-minute report on Bell’s withdrawal from teaching and an additional seven minutes of raw clips from the protest, Frontline says “no other footage of the event exists at WGBH.” Excerpts from the tape appeared in a Frontline documentary on Obama in 2008, and have been available online ever since.

Second Update | The Breitbart site has posted its first purported evidence of what they call Bell’s “radical … bizarre … racialist, antisemitic” views, a short story he wrote called “Space Traders.” (You can read that story and judge it for yourself here.) Unfortunately for their attempt to tar Obama with the contents of that story, however, it was published in October 1993, some three years after Obama’s Harvard speech.

Third Update | One amusing moment from the WBGH tape: Professor Bell is seen at 8:52 noting that while he himself relied on a written outline for his address, “the student” — future president Obama — “delivered a mighty address without notes.” Given Breitbart’s fondness for making teleprompter jokes at Obama’s expense, that one’s got to sting a little.

Fourth Update | Unsurprisingly, the Breitbart gloss on Bell’s short story, “Space Traders,” as antisemitic is unwarranted. In the story, a sci-fi allegory which imagines space aliens offering the United States untold wealth in exchange for its black citizenry, a group of Jews object to the trade. The Breitbart site quotes an op-ed by a federal judge as saying that in the story, the Jews are motivated not by “empathy from another group that has suffered oppression” but “instead” by fear “that ‘in the absence of blacks, Jews could become the scapegoats.'”

But this is a tendentious misreading of Bell, who describes the Jewish leaders as denouncing “America’s version of the Final Solution to its race problem” and promising to disrupt it by ” all possible nonviolent means” if necessary, including by hiding black families in their own homes “until the nation returns to its senses.” Jewish concern that they could become scapegoats should blacks disappear is offered by Bell as an additional fear, not as a true, duplicitous motivation, and it is a fear that Bell presents as justified in “a system so reliant on an identifiable group on whose heads less-well-off whites can discharge their hate and frustrations for societal disabilities about which they are unwilling to confront their leaders.”

Great writing? Maybe not. Subtle writing? Probably not. But antisemitic? Not that either.

Fifth Update | Okay, I watched Hannity. They found a two-second clip of Obama hugging Bell after introducing him at the rally, and a clip of Harvard professor Charles Ogletree joking that he hid that clip from the media during the 2008 campaign. That’s it. That’s the whole thing that they have.

Are College Students a Privileged Elite?

March 7, 2012 in Access, Class, Gender, Occupy Wall Street, Organizing, Race | by | 2 comments

A little while ago I linked to a piece by Malcolm Harris on what he calls the “generational war” being waged against American youth. Harris’s argument has been criticized from the left by a blogger named Freddie DeBoer who writes that he’s “using the language of revolution to justify what is, at its essence, a dispute among the ruling class,” making “a case that is simply antithetical to the left-wing project: the notion that recent college graduates are the dispossessed.”

College is, DeBoer writes, the province of the elite:

Less than a third of Americans has a bachelor’s degree. The racial college achievement gap is large, and it’s not shrinking; it’s growing. Social class is extremely determinative of access to college education.  From 1970 to 2006, those from the highest income quartile had a better than 70 percent change of holding a college degree. Those in the lowest quartile? 10 percent.

This is an important argument, and so it’s important to point out that DeBoer gets it wrong.

Yes, the white and the wealthy are more likely to attend college than the black (and Latino) and the poor. That’s true. But it’s less true than it’s been in the past, not more. Just look at the numbers:

In 1975, 64.5% of high income Americans who graduated from high school went on directly to college, while 34.8% of low income high school graduates did, a ratio of 1.9 to 1. A wealthy student, in other words, was nearly twice as likely as a poor one to go immediately to college, even if they both graduated from high school. By 2009, that ratio had dropped to 1.5 to 1. (The gap in high school graduation rates by income has remained largely constant during the same period.)

Comparing educational outcomes by race shows similar results. In 1970, a white American 25 or older was 2.6 times as likely than a black American in the same age group to have a college degree. Today, that ratio is 1.5 to 1. When whites and Latinos are compared the gap has narrowed more slowly — from 2.5 to 1 in 1970 to 2.2 to 1 in 2010 — but again, the trend is positive.

(And though DeBoer doesn’t discuss gender, it’s worth pointing out how much things have changed there too — in 1960, men earned almost two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees and ninety percent of doctorates. By 2009, women were earning 58% of all degrees granted in the United States, and more than half of doctorates.)

There are still racial and economic barriers to higher education, of course, and the issues that Harris identified are prominent among them. But DeBoer’s characterization of college students as white and privileged ignores major changes that have taken place in the demographics higher education in recent decades, perpetuating the tired stereotype of student activists as coddled whiners.

The American student body does not reflect the nation as a whole, not yet. But it comes closer to doing so than it ever has in the past, and the folks in Occupy who are fighting for higher education access and student debt relief are fighting to bring it even closer.

Is Occupy Wall Street a Youth Movement?

March 7, 2012 in Students | by | 2 comments

Over at The New Inquiry, Malcolm Harris is taking a look at the dismal circumstances today’s young people find themselves in. Youth unemployment is at record levels. Youth arrest rates are skyrocketing even as youth crime plummets. College tuition is going through the roof, as is youth debt, and household incomes of youth-headed families are lagging far behind those of other age cohorts.

It’s ugly.

And that ugliness is the cause, Harris says, of Occupy Wall Street:

It isn’t a stretch to call the recent wave of American occupations a youth movement. Originating from student struggles against high tuition — in California, New York, and most militantly, Puerto Rico —  the occupations channeled young Americans’ fear and insecurity into often inchoate action. … President Obama sold himself so successfully to young Americans by mirroring our hopes for post-Bush reform that the resulting disappointment is directed more toward the hope itself than the man who never stood much of a chance of fulfilling it. It’s in this situation, when reform in the government and in the workplace feels exhausted, that the framework of liberal aspirations and demands collapses. And Occupy Wall Street is the most palatable instantiation of this post-hope politics by process of elimination that we’re likely to see.

There’s a lot more to Harris’ piece, and it’s all worth reading, so go read it.

 

Police Anonymity Demands Thwart Release of UC Davis Pepper Spray Report

March 6, 2012 in Administration, Campus Protests, Civil Liberties, Governance, Litigation, Police, Student Power | by | Leave a comment

As I noted last month, only one of the dozens of police officers involved in the notorious November 18 UC Davis pepper-spray incident has yet been publicly identified. Now a police demand for continued anonymity has delayed today’s intended release of the university’s report on the incident.

Attorneys for the officers claim that because the report includes “confidential peace officer matters such as the name of the peace officers and some sort of description of wrongdoing,” its release would violate state law.

The report, originally slated for a December release, has already been delayed multiple times. The most recent stumbling block came in response to a police union request for redaction of information about individual officers. A judge has scheduled a March 16 hearing on the issue.

The authors of the report have compromised with police before, but it seems like their patience may be wearing thin.

Retired California supreme court justice Cruz Reynoso, the chair of the commission, said in a statement that he was “very frustrated” by the delay, and remains committed to releasing “the complete and unredacted work of the task force.”

UC president Mark Yudof, who has presided over multiple incidents of police violence against non-violent student protesters over the last three years, took a similarly aggressive posture. He has, he said, “asked the UC General Counsel’s office to do everything in its power in court to turn back this attempt to stifle these reports” to ensure “a fully transparent and unexpurgated accounting of the incidents in question.”

In a separate statement, UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi said “the campus’s own internal affairs investigation into complaints of officer misconduct, which would be the basis for any personnel actions concerning the accused officers,” was “near completion.”

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