Derrick Bell is listed as one of the legal scholars responsible for the development of critical race theory. He was a former Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law and a friend with whom I spent some time.
We met when I served as chair of the Board of Visitors for the law school. We became better acquainted when he and his wife Jewell accepted an invitation to visit the ranch where I grew up, followed by a dance in Antelope. The event was a fundraiser for the city during its struggle with the Rajneesh.
The Bells were great sports, despite encounters with a rattlesnake along Pine Hollow Creek and an inebriated cowboy in Antelope. Derrick gave me a copy of his legal textbook, Race, Racism and American Law, with this note, his signature, and the date: “One hopes that one visit deserves another.” That was June, 1982, but a return visit was not to be. Derrick returned to Harvard Law in 1986, and died in 2011 at age 80. Cancer also claimed Jewell, at age 58 in 1990.
Would that he were still around to speak to those who have contorted critical race theory, now often referred to as CRT, into something it is not.
How are those three words and letters being used today? Glenn Youngkin used them extensively in his successful Virginia governor’s race. He pledged to ban the teaching of critical race theory in his first day in office, because “To teach our children to divide everyone through a lens of race, and call one group ‘oppressors’ and one group ‘victims’ and pit them against one another is not right.”
Legislatures and local school boards across the country are using the same kind of arguments about race as did Youngkin, casting any opposition to their view as divisive and unpatriotic.
Derrick Bell would probably laugh at the irony in how cleverly doublespeak has been employed by the primarily Republican contortionists of his legal theory.
He would do a much better job, but I will attempt an explanation intended to make sense to any reader, law degree or not.
We need first to agree that slavery is not and was not a good thing. Few are today saying it was, but many are saying we should forget it ever happened.
History is clear that the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution that followed the Civil War did not establish equality for people whose skin was not white.
Some words say more than others. On the subject of race relations, a stand out is miscegenation. Legal barriers to mixing races were enacted to “keep bloodlines pure” and preserve differences based on skin color. Many, including Thomas Jefferson, had difficulty with this principle but found ways to rationalize the results of irrepressible instincts. His home state of Virginia enacted the first statute barring interracial marriage in 1662. Such laws were not invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967, in well-named Loving v. Virginia.
Words have power and these taken together with any interpretation of our history, lead to the conclusion and legal theory offered by Professor Bell. Despite all of the actions taken in the name of equality of the races, racism is woven into the fabric of society so thoroughly that reforms have failed. Antidiscrimination laws, including amendments to the Constitution, have fallen well short of achieving the goals expressed in our founding documents. Racial equality has not been achieved, but despite pessimism generated by a lifetime of struggle, the Derrick Bell I knew was still hopeful.
It is impossible to be uncritical of what racial intolerance has done, not just theoretically, but in centuries of obvious personal and social tragedies.
Jewell and Derrick, I regret that it has taken so long to return the visit.
Keith Mobley is a retired lawyer from Dufur, currently in Sunriver, Ore.
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