Excerpted from Right Side News:
Bell believed then, as he did for the rest of his life, that whites would support civil rights protections for blacks only if those protections would also promote white self-interest and social status. Since Bell viewed racial minorities as a permanently oppressed caste — and he saw racism as a normal, permanent aspect of American life — he reasoned that equality before the law was unfair to blacks, whose moral claims were superior to those of whites. Bell endorsed a journal called Race Traitor, which is dedicated to the “abolition of whiteness,” and whose motto is “Treason to the white race is loyalty to humanity.”
Professor Bell (and his fellow Critical Race theorists) held that existing legal structures are, like American society at large, racist in their very construction. Critical Race Theory suggests that to combat this “institutional racism,” oppressed racial groups have both the right and the duty to decide, for themselves, which laws are valid and are worth observing. Critical Race Theory also promotes the use of storytelling narratives in law-review articles to better reflect the “oral traditions” of black experience. Bell used the technique of placing legal and social commentary into the mouths of invented characters extensively in his writings. While acknowledging that this “style of storytelling” was “less rigorous than the doctrine-laden, citation-heavy law review pieces,” he employed it nonetheless.
There’s a shorthand for this discursive mode: fascism. There is nothing anti-essentialist about this brand of race-based hatred.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member