The belief that racism is ineradicable has inevitably shaped the character of antiracism today

by Kenan Malik 

‘‘Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well. Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us. Surely, they must know that their deliverance depends on letting down their ropes. Only by working together is escape possible. Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment to keeping us where we are, at whatever cost to them, as to us.”

That is the arresting image that opens Derrick Bell’s 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well. It is a work of existential despair, but, for Bell, the only realistic way of thinking about the place in which African Americans find themselves. Racism, he wrote, “is an integral, permanent and indestructible component of this society”. Black people “will never gain full equality”. Even “those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress’, short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies.” Not to accept that fact was to do great mental and emotional harm. Since “racial equality is… not a realistic goal”, to be “constantly aiming for a status that is unobtainable in a perilously racist America” would lead only to “frustration and despair”.

Derrick Bell is not a household name. Yet few people have been more important in shaping contemporary thinking about race, particularly in the United States. From Barack Obama to Ta-Nehisi Coates, leading black thinkers have paid tribute to Bell’s inspiration. There are not many legal scholars in recent memory, wrote Michelle Alexander, the influential author of The New Jim Crow, who “have [had] a greater impact on racial justice thought and advocacy”….

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/6129/the-paralysing-pessimism-of-critical-race-theory