Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die
Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies
Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’
Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?
Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism
Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism
In the first essay featured in Afrolantica Legacies Derrick Bell puts his words in Bill Clinton’s mouth. This excerpt from page 13 of Afrolantica Legacies imagines a speech in 1998 from the president titled “Racial Liberation Day: The Challenge for White Americans”:
For Bell’s Critical Race Theory political theology the concept of “racism” shifted from the concrete (Jim Crow) to an abstraction:
… racism is a system of continuing and cumulative advantage that benefits all whites whether or not they seek it.
Thus, Bell can now use this abstraction as the ghost in the gears, the necessary, permanent explanation for any individual black American’s personal failures and professional inadequacies:
As Americans, we want to believe that our country is a meritocracy where anyone who has talent and works hard can be successful. Charges of racial discrimination threaten that image and, in all but the most blatant cases, many whites find it difficult to take them seriously. Thus when blacks assert that racism is alive and flourishing, whites find denial is the easier, the more comforting reaction.
Perhaps the reasons for Bell’s attacks on meritocracy are more personal than political, as Thomas Sowell observes:
Sowell:
Derrick Bell was put in an impossible position. He was hired as a full professor at the Harvard Law School when he himself said he did not have the kinds of qualifications that people have when they get appointed as full professors at the Harvard law school. And so what were his options? His options were to be a nobody among world famous intellectuals or to go off on his own shtick and try to be important or significant in that way. And he chose the low road… The fundamental problem was making him a professor at the Harvard Law School when even he himself knew that was not something that he merited.
In upcoming parts of this continuing journey through Afrolantica we’ll see more instances of Bell’s commentary that read in a different light when understood in the context of the professor’s own career.
“When whites assert that racism is dead as a dominant force in the lives of black Americans, and that individual success can now be determined essentially by the combined efforts and collective cultural capital of the individual, family, and local community that can overcome historical trends of the past if the right decisons are made, blacks find denial is the easier, the more comforting reaction.”
the talk of racism is part of the ruling elites means of control over the population.
it is way past being a joke. black african caucus in the congress. YOU CAN NOT BE MORE RACIST THEN THAT.
it is brutal how the black americans have used discrimination and racism as a club to beat white people. (of course not all) but the systemic racism that prevails in north america (Canada is adopting the victim class now and the same race problems that were previously just south of the border are now visible in Canada.
travel around the world and you will find that north america (the USA and Canada ) are actually much less racist then virtually any other country.
He’s got it set up pretty nicely. As a white (pigmentally challenged), you are a racist just by being white. You have no choice about it. It has nothing to do with your own thoughts and feelings, but by simply being born white, you are automatically racist.
If Obama was such a fan, what does this say about his personal attitude towards a large portion of this country? One has to wonder.
I wonder if la belle idiota ever read about how a racial minority no one liked or wanted called the East India Company took over a sub-continent. In the beginning they were nothing and no one and subverted the entire place – and they didn’t do it using brute force in the main. I’m not celebrating it, but just saying. And then there’s Cortes marching into the heart of an empire, completely outside those institutions, and bringing it down. You can’t keep a good man down and success and failure are their own explanations. I’m trying to imagine a scenario where disgruntled Conquistadors and the Duke of Wellington are sitting around writing books about “What If” and “Why We Can’t.” Bell has the mind of a pouty child that has no understanding of how the world or success works. However, like his ilk, he is good at making up theories that explain away failure and pinning it on others. Not a paradigm for success to say the least.