A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies, Part 1
As a 28-year-old student at Harvard Law Barack Obama supported the activism of Professor Derrick Bell and urged his peers to open their hearts and minds to the words of Critical Race Theory‘s founder.
But what did Bell believe and how could his ideas have any relation to the president’s policies today?
The answers to these questions reside in Bell’s 1998 book Afrolantica Legacies, published by Third World Press. I read it over the weekend and will share a series of excerpts this week with analysis.
The myth of the rise and fall of Afrolantica — a kind of Atlantis where only African Americans can live — opens the book and provides Bell with a way to tie together his essays, fictional dialogues, and political parables written through the ’80s and ’90s. From seven of these essays, Bell extracts these principles to serve as “rules of racial preservation”:
Is this about the mythical land where there are only black folks but with all the things only white folks can make? That would be the proverbial moment frozen in time since it would fall apart in about 5 minutes. Spend two years watching Egyptians struggle with doorknobs like they’re a Rubik’s Cube like I have and you too will suddenly believe in American exceptionalism and see Bell as a fairy with a magic racial wand that makes naughty door knobs evil oppressors.
Unless you think CNN lies about Mauritania only abolishing slavery in 1981 and making it an actual crime to own another human being in 2007. Despite 10 to 20% of the populace being in slavery, they’ve managed to actually herd one person to a conviction. This means that if slavery were legal in America, I’d only need a boat and a Visa card. Yeah, no way that situation didn’t exist in the “enlightened” old days.
Bell’s version of slavery is white guys on horses deep in the African interior picking black folks off like Charleton Heston in “Planet of the Apes.” Ironcially white folks didn’t go into the interior until after the trade was abolished. The reality is that Europeans went to stores on the coast and bought black folks from other black folks. For pointing this out by David Horowitz was accused by the Southern Poverty Law Center of using what may be hate-speech. On the Left, history and reality are indeed racist. That’s why a Derrick Bell is needed to explain away history and reality with the blame and excuse factory called Critical Race Theory.
This has been a Derrick Bell moment. Now I’ll go back to acting normal.
And most of those “stores” were operated by Muslim Arab slave traders, who had been there for 500 years before the Europeans ever showed up (the vast majority of slaves in Europe before around 1200 AD were other Europeans – war captives or debt slaves). I’ve always found the concept of a “Black Muslim” (e.g. the Nation of Islam) to be rather ironic.
A recent passenger – black, military to civil service career- had lost his career due to Atlanta nepotism. He was a true follower of CRT and the belief that “you cannot be black and Republican!” (quote)
He was torn with grief, rage, and shattered loyalties.
He even said that he could work better with the openly Klan police dept. in Jacksonville, FL, because he knew what to expect from them.
The all-black system in Atlanta pushed him out of a 20-year career because if you ain’t family, you ain’t anybody.
Betrayed by his own people, he had lost so much.
The career, the promotions he had worked hard for. Now back to blue collar.
This guy was no slacker- far more professional, uni-educated, he said that even Chicago was a much more merit based system.
He was black in Atlanta, yet they still saw him as a hostile ‘outsider’!
A good man- I respect people who defend their own- but so torn up inside.
add: I should have said (all-black), all Democrat system in Atlanta; still, that also holds true for Florida and Chicago, doesn’t it.
Odd how urban and agency Democrat strongholds are all mired in race politics and corruption. Must be a coincidence.
So Bell was a fraud, as is Leonard Jeffries, who plagiarized his ideas from a white author who wrote People of the Ice back in the late 60′s/early 70′s. Bell is just another in the long line of African-American frauds dating back to at least Marcus Grvey, and that include Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and Cornell West. These people are part of the tragic hold that bitternes and defeatism have held on Black America to this day. These fraudsters have all spun bizarre, unbelievable tales with no anchor in reality whatsover, and have been succesful as a result. The integrity of the W.E.B Duboises and Martin Luther Kings has been wiped out by such creatures, and ground into the dirt by the likes of Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright. The Black Panthers were never an actual revolutionary insurrection, but were a criminal gang from the get-go.
It is no wonder that the greatest fraud of them all, the current President, has bee a fellow traveler of a number of them.
The great tragedy is that after the Civil Rights Movement was won via passage of the Voting Rights Act, the larger society permitted the “human rights” hustlers—Marxists, separatists, Islamists, and racists—to sideline King, and tacitly agreed to buy off these racial caciques with affirmative-action payoffs, permitting them to create ghetto fiefdoms. The society is now reaping the reward of that course of action.
I don’t think *society* can be blamed for this. If someone stood up and said “I speak for white people”, they’d be laughed out of the public square — and, yes, I’ve seen this done, in college when a white supremacist tried to get his fifteen minutes of fame. But Sharpton and Lynch and Jackson and the like — it’s the voices opposed to them that are treated as the fringe.
The press deserves some blame, for not doing a good job of reminding people of these people’s records, but in the end, there’s been not but acquiescence from the “black community” towards these clowns.
Sharptoon and Jackassson serve the purposes of the white liberal elite. They love the dependency of these two always demanding (read: begging for scraps from the master’s table)their “due”. It makes government (and academia) more powerful, it strokes their egos, and it also gives the appearance of power to the liberal’s “house Ni**ers”(Sharptoon and Jackassson).
In any case, what I can’t fathom fools like Bell not understanding that, if it’s all about power with no moral basis; then they have no reason to complain about the way blacks have been treated by whites. They are simply more powerful. If your ambition is simply to oppress them in the same manner as you say they have oppressed you, then you have become them.
The Bell curve – swing and a miss. Reality strikes out. Final score: Political Correctness 11, Reality 0.
What are you talking about?
Isn’t Afrolantica also know as Haiti? What a wonderful place with wonderful people like Little Doc to take care of your every wish. Ah, what a beautiful place.
I’m white.
My wife is black (Indian actually).