I had to go out for a while this afternoon, but Bell was right up Obama’s radical alley. I found it interesting that Bell was a Carter guy and that he spent a lot of time in Mississippi during the school integration.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1987-09-04/news/0140320016_1_slavery-escaped-slaves-slave-states
Blacks Were Dealt A Bad Hand From The Nation’s Beginning
September 4, 1987|
By Derrick Bell, Newsday
Black people are the sacrificial lambs of American constitutional law. At the country’s beginning they were the victims of the slavery compromises that made the Constitution possible, and which condemned them to a subordinate status from which they have never fully emerged.
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall called these compromises ‘’flaws’’ in a much publicized speech earlier this year, but the surrender of black rights to further white interests reveals less a flaw than the function race serves in minimizing and stabilizing the society’s many political and socio-
economic class differences.
(snip)
Policies of racial sacrifice are much in evidence today. A key component of the Reagan administration’s political success has been the sacrifice of black civil-rights gains to hold the votes of many whites who have hardly benefited from policies that enrich the rich, while disadvantaging the white as well as black poor.
Policies based on the racial-sacrifice ritual are not painless, as the devastation among the black poor and the disenchantment among even successful members of the black middle class will attest.
Paradoxically, the sacrifice is made easier because blacks, perhaps more than most Americans, have never been tempted by non-democratic ideologies and have kept faith in the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, so much proclaimed by whites and so little enjoyed by blacks.
Even as the bicentennial bells ring, that faith is being strained as never before. Should it finally fail, frantic efforts to atone for the sacrifices of blacks made to undergird the dominance of whites could come too late.