Honoring Derrick Bell

Yesterday, a giant in modern legal thought passed away at the age of 80. Derrick Bell was best known as an early pioneer of critical race theory, a stream of legal thought that we have written about before in this blog. At the center of critical race theory is the rejection of objectivity. As Peggy McIntosh pointed long enough ago that Jacob complains it is too basic, white people cannot know all the privilege they possess just by virtue of being white. That is not a point about fault; rather it's a statement about our collective inability to escape our own expereince. While law is founded on "objective" principles, they are really the objective principles according to almost entirely white male judges and legislators over the centuries. Instead, critical race theory embraces narratives and a variety of perspectives, particularly those voices of color that were missing for all those years.

As an academic discipline, critical race theorists began pointing out the irony that so many of the legal academics writing about race and more generally, the academics that were even employed, were not people of color. If the fact of law being mostly written by white people was a problem, then obviously it was a problem that the legal commentary in the academy was also written by all white people. That's why I love this paragraph from the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school that is not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.

Eventually, for example, he left Harvard Law because they had not yet hired a black woman on the faculty. Because he believed that legal thought was not being shaped enough by black voices, he would not remain part of a school that used its immense influence to exacerbate the problem.