Confronting Authority by Derrick Bell

Derrick Bell was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard Law School. This happened in 1971. This book is his story of his protest for the Harvard Law School to tenure its first African-American woman. He announced his unpaid leave April 24, 1990. 

Universities often have visiting professors, sometimes for multiple semesters, but these professors are not embraced until they are given tenure. Bell watched as qualified African-American professors who were teaching at Harvard were rejected or overlooked for tenure. Harvard did not enjoy his protest and ultimately, after three years, terminated his tenure. 

Bell tells this story, but also uses it as an example to explore all the aspects of protest, especially a solitary one like this. In it, he walks us through the many ways status quo is maintained ... as he states in the conclusion - "After all, there is at Harvard, as in the rest of our modern world, a distressing commitment to the unwritten commandment: 'Thou shalt conform and not confront.'" (163)

He also employed a creative method that runs alongside this exploration. It is a short story about a country divided by class with the Citadel and its ruler over the "low-landers". Each chapter shares a little more of that story. Here is a line from early in this other story: "Thoroughly downtrodden peoples exhaust themselves with the tasks of survival. It is when their conditions improve, however slightly, that some among them envision a better life and, nurturing dreams of freedom, sow the seeds of eventual revolt." (9)

He covers a lot of ways that authority staves off substantial change. One is for "those in power" to hire "a few token qualified blacks--who today remain in largely the same positions in largely the same numbers." Or the catch-22 he experienced being the first tenured African-American at Harvard Law. "If I did well, my success would lesson any obligation to look for other minorities. If I performed poorly, my failure would serve as an excuse to abandon further minority recruitment." (38) Or further on he shares what one colleague says "Bell, your success is due to unusual talent and is hardly an argument against Harvard's traditional hiring standards." Bell explains "This assessment, deemed a compliment, is actually an insult. It bars me from using my hard-earned success as proof of what other blacks can do ... When we excel, we are the exception, not the potential norm." (42)

Bell is one of the scholars behind Critical Race Theory and this book is a very readable introduction to some of these ideas. On a basic level, it is that who you are informs how you read the issues and which issues you read. It is a nice dream that we can become fully objective and address issues as an abstract brain, but it doesn't really work out for human beings. 

Bell shares his own further realization of this and how it led to his protest with a quote from the letter he wrote to a colleague explaining his protest: "Although, I have never forgotten my representational function on this faculty, I was slow to recognize that as a black man, I am not able to understand, interpret, and articulate the very unique conditions and challenges black women face. While I urged the hiring of black women, I thought that as a black man I could both comprehend and represent the needs and interests of black women. A modicum of exposure to feminist writings, particularly those of black women ... disabused me of this unintended but no less inexcusable presumptuousness" (57)

Sadly, he received no response from this colleague or anyone else on the Appointments Committee. Harvard and many other institutions as well were able to use the five black men on the faculty as "insulation against charges the Law School was discriminating against minorities. The school could also point to the few black women and Latino teachers who were invited for one-year visits. Although none of them gained permanent positions, they seemingly were always under consideration." (63)

And then there is the exploration of the American idea of Merit-as-the-way. He tells about teaching at Pace University Law School and a white student pushing back against affirmative action saying that today we don't need it because "everyone must make it on merit. That is the American way." Professor Bell reflects, "In response, I suggested to him that while he seemed quite able, as able as the students I had taught at Harvard and met at Yale and Columbia, when he graduated from Pace he would have a hard time competing at large corporate law firms, whose hiring partners prefer to hire lawyers whose parents had been able to send them to Harvard, Yale and Columbia." Then he asked the student for a response. 

"'That's the breaks,' he said finally. I looked at him in wonder. 'In other words,' I said, 'you will be deeply suspicious if any black--no matter how able--gets a job you want, but you will step aside and let upper-class whites no smarter than you take jobs you want to advance your career and support your family?' 'Well,' he said finally, trying to muster a degree of dignity, 'one of these days, I hope to be able to send my kids to Harvard and Yale.' I shook my head. Racism has been devastating for blacks, but it has also done serious harm to a great many whites." (86)

"Critical race theory ... is a new approach to legal theory pioneered by minority scholars ... we bring the vision of a contracts professor who has read the slavery contract of her [own] grandmother; a torts instructor who examines torts of racist slurs and deprivations. The issues did not find their way into law reviews or classrooms until the minority scholars who thought and cared about them deeply introduced them introduced them--just as most issues of particular concern to women, like sexual harassment, job discrimination, and rape, were neglected until women were accepted into the legal hierarchy and made male legal scholars take notice of these issues. The exclusion of these topics, you can be certain, was as much a product of the ignorance of those who did not confront them in their everyday lives, as a calculated decision that the subjects were unworthy and ultimately subversive." (112)

In the end, he challenges me that "commitment to change must be combined with readiness to confront authority. Not because you will always win, not because you will always be right, but because your faith in what you believe is right must be a living, working faith, a faith that draws you away from comfort and security and toward risk, when necessary, through confrontation." (163) Earlier he paraphrased the Bible, "intellect without action, like faith without works, standing alone, is dead." (108)