Don't trivialize the importance of Barry's love for Derrick

Racial Quota Fallout

By Thomas Sowell (Archive) ·

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Many years ago, I learned of an episode in the life of a promising
young black man that is relevant to things happening now. He had been
educated at a good school, and went on to receive degrees at good
colleges and universities. Then he went for a Ph.D. in mathematics at
one of the leading departments in that field.

When he encountered difficulties, his professors essentially wrote
his doctoral thesis for him. No doubt they felt good about doing
something to help a promising young black man, and perhaps took pride in
doing so. But what about his pride?

This young man ended up joining an extremist group that hated white people.

Would it have been worse if he had not gotten a Ph.D. in math?
Probably 99 percent of the people in this country, regardless of race,
could not get a Ph.D. in math -- and yet they can still live happy and
fulfilling lives.

What recalled this episode from long ago was the current flurry of
interest in a video of a young Barack Obama at the Harvard law school
praising Derrick Bell, a black professor there, whose writings on
"critical race theory" promoted an extremist hostility to white people.

Derrick Bell was for years a civil rights lawyer, but not an academic
legal scholar of the sort who gets appointed as a full professor at one
of the leading law schools. Yet he became a visiting professor at the
Stanford law school and was a full professor at the Harvard law school.

It was transparently obvious in both cases that his appointment was
because he was black, not because he had the qualifications that got
other people appointed to these faculties. At Stanford, his students
complained that his course on constitutional law was not up to the
standards of the other courses they were taking.

Stanford at that time had one of the leading scholars in
constitutional law, Professor Gerald Gunther -- and Derrick Bell was no
Gerald Gunther. A hastily created program of study of constitutional law
was then used to teach that subject to students who were not getting
what they needed in Professor Bell's course.

When this clever finessing of the problem came to light, the
administration apologized -- to Derrick Bell for the embarrassment this
caused him.

They should have apologized to the law students for short-changing
them with a professor who was not up to the job -- and to those who
donated money to the university to advance the cause of education, not
to allow administrators to play racial quota politics on campus.

As a full professor at the Harvard law school, Derrick Bell was also
surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic
scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect
of either faculty or students at the Harvard law school -- or, more
important, his own self-respect. Bell himself admitted that he did not
have the scholarly credentials that most full professors at the Harvard
law school have.

There were no doubt other law schools where he would have been a
respected colleague, but these were not Stanford or Harvard. Yet it is
worth remembering that millions of people have led happy and fulfilling
lives without ever being at Harvard or Stanford.

Derrick Bell's options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of
more accomplished legal scholars -- or to go off on some wild tangent of
his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and
beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose.
His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible
things about civil rights issues that he understood from his years of
experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent
speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white
people were the cause of black people's problems.

Bell even said that he took it as his mission to say things to annoy
white people. Perhaps he thought that was better than being
insignificant in his academic setting. But it was in fact far worse,
because the real damage was to impressionable young blacks who took him
seriously, including one who went on to become President of the United
States.