'Open Your Hearts, Open Your Minds' to the Radicalism of Barack Obama and Derrick Bell

On Sean Hannity’s Fox show tonight, Breitbart editors Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollack explained more about the Barack Obama Harvard tape that hit earlier today. It turns out that there were two important facts about the tape that Buzzfeed’s pre-emptive scoop left out. One, Professor Derrick Bell’s true radicalism and young Barack Obama’s embrace of same (and of Bell himself at the end of the tape), and academia’s and the media’s successful cover-up of that tape. At Breitbart’s Big Government, Ben Shapiro goes into more detail about that second part, the cover-up.

Bell’s ideas, the ones Obama associated himself with in that 1991 video up to the time of Bell’s death in late 2011, are bizarre and radical. But like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s ideas, Bell’s are largely obscure to most Americans. “Critical race theory” doesn’t sound any worse than “Black liberation theology.”  But both are racist at their core. Critical race theory posits that American society is inherently racist, that all white people are inherently racist, and that only fundamental transformation can change things. Bell believed that even remedies to racism were racist, if they came from the white power structure. Here’s how the New York Times explains Bell:

He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even many of those intended to redress past injustices. His 1973 book, “Race, Racism and American Law,” became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.

Bell wasn’t just seeking diversity in Harvard’s faculty. He was a virulent racist, who depicted President Ronald Reagan as a — not making this up — racist space alien who offered to buy all of America’s black citizens to erase the nation’s deficit.

That’s from a short story Bell wrote, that he later turned into a piece for HBO. It’s a smear. It’s insane. It’s evil. And it’s from the man that young Barack Obama wanted his fellow Harvard students to “open their hearts and minds” to. Obama associated himself with Derrick Bell for decades, up to October 2011 when Bell died at the age of 80.