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The Void That Critical Race Theory Was Created To Fill [newyorker.com]

 

By Laruen Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, July 27, 2021

In 1971, Derrick Bell, a forty-year-old civil-rights attorney, became the first Black professor to gain tenure at Harvard Law School. A soft-spoken and prolific scholar, with glasses and a short fro coming to a widow’s peak, Bell was a Pittsburgh native and Air Force veteran who, before his career in academia, had worked with Thurgood Marshall composing legal strategies against school segregation in the South, at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, and as the deputy director of civil rights at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. At Harvard, he created and taught the school’s first course of its kind on civil-rights law, providing students the only sanctioned opportunity for left-of-liberal legal training on the interworking of race and power. As a scholar, he published studies such as “Serving Two Masters,” in which he argued that the pursuit of racial balance in schools following the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was eclipsing efforts to improve the quality of education for Black children, leaving civil-rights lawyers compromised between their clients’ interests and the law.

Bell was a knowing token of sorts. “It became untenable for them to be an all-white institution,” he recalled, of Harvard, in an interview in 1993. “The status quo was better stabilized by moving in this direction a little bit.” But over the years Bell grew increasingly displeased with the school’s stagnant hiring practices regarding minority professors. He threatened to leave, and, in 1980, he did, moving on to the University of Oregon, to become the dean of its law school. (He would later resign from that post, and from a second post at Harvard, over the institutions’ resistance to hiring women of color.) Upon his departure from Harvard, Constitutional Law and Minority Issues was dropped from the curriculum. The following academic year, the Black Law Students Association met with the school’s dean, James Vorenberg, urging that the course be continued and that a Black professor qualified to teach it be hired. According to the scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was a Harvard Law School student at the time, Vorenberg asked the students what was “so special” about Constitutional Law and Minority Issues. In terms of hiring, would they not prefer an “excellent white professor” over a “mediocre Black one”? Rebuking this false choice, the students compiled a list of thirty Black professors whom the school might consider. (All ten of the professors hired that year were white.)

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