Courageous visitor needs your support
Chicago Sun-Times - Tuesday, October 22, 1991
Author: Vernon Jarrett
Yes, this indeed is an unsolicited commercial, an urgent appeal to all ye brothers and sisters of all races and faiths who don't like the revival of sexism and racism that is promoted both arrogantly and subtly in our country today. One small plea:
Please contact the Community Renewal Society, and purchase your tickets for its annual banquet this Thursday at the Palmer House. The featured speaker is Professor Derrick A. Bell Jr., a distinguished sage whose courage ranks as high as his academic accomplishments.
This is the same African American author of several monumental studies and volumes of research on human rights who took leave of his Harvard Law School professorship last year in protest of Harvard ‘s shortage of women and racial minorities among its law faculty. Professor Bell has since joined the law faculty at New York University.
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Hill vs. Thomas - Spotlighting Splits and Diversity Among Black Americans
Chicago Sun-Times - Sunday, November 22, 1992
Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Race-ing Justice,
En-gendering Power Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality. Edited by Toni Morrison. Pantheon. $15.
Court of Appeal The Black Community Speaks Out on the Racial and Sexual Politics of Thomas vs. Hill. Edited by The Black Scholar. Ballantine. $9.
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There are pieces by notables such as June Jordan, Maulana Karenga, Maya Angelou, Derrick Bell and Julian Bond - as well as a host of intellectuals who may be less prominent but are no less incisive. Readers will agree some of the essays are marvels of clarity and reason while others are maddeningly tendentious and unenlightened. But they won’t agree which ones are which.
The editors, Robert Chrisman and Robert L. Allen, wanted to represent the diversity of opinion on Thomas and Hill within black America, and in this they have succeeded.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard University. This review first appeared in Newsday.
Obama , the postmodernist - In the Illinois senator’s world, words have no fixed meaning, and truth is often just a matter of perspective.
USA TODAY (Arlington, VA) - Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Author: Jonah Goldberg: (c) USA TODAY
EXCERPT
Obama gives every indication of having evolved from this intellectual soup. As a student and, later, a law school instructor, Obama was sympathetic to Critical Race Theory, a wholly owned franchise of postmodernism. At Harvard , Obama revered Derrick Bell , a controversial black law professor who preferred personally defined literary truths over old-fashioned literal truth. Words are power, Bell and Co. argued, and your so-called facts are merely myths of the white power structure.