Last Wednesday, March 7th, Breitbart.com released the much-anticipated video of a young Barack Obama embracing a Harvard law professor named Derrick Bell and advising fellow students to “open up your hearts and minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell”. This video was taken during a 1990 student gathering supporting Professor Bell after he vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence from Harvard until it appointed a colored woman to its tenured facilities. Also in the video was one of the future president's Harvard mentors, Charles Ogletree in 2011, saying that the video had been hidden during the 2008 campaign. Here is the video:
So why was this hidden? Would it have been harmful to Obama’s 2008 campaign? The answer is clear when you take a look at who this professor really was. According to Wikipedia: “
“Bell is arguably the most influential source of thought critical of traditional civil rights discourse. Bell’s critique represented a challenge to the dominant liberal and conservative position on civil rights, race, and the law. He employed three major arguments in his analysis of racial patterns in American law: constitutional contradiction, the interest convergence principal, and the price of racial remedies.”1
What does this mean? First, let's define “constitutional contradiction”. In her "Loss of a Critical Theorist: Derrick Bell", Carmen Stokes from the Eastern Michigan University wrote the following.
In his exposition of the constitutional contradiction, Bell elucidated how, in his opinion, the constitution was written to protect the property rights of the forefathers of the United States of America, not for the benefit of “the people” (Bell, 1980). In addition, he suggested that Blacks (and other minorities) were systematically excluded from rights and privileges enjoyed by Whites in society unless extending such rights to other racial groups converged with the interest (i.e. preserving the privilege and/or benefit) of White people, which he coined “interest convergence.”2
So, Professor Bell believed that the Founding Fathers designed the US Constitution to put the black community in a lower class than white people enjoyed.
Moving on, we will discuss his “interest convergence" principal. In an essay titled Brown vs. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma, Bell writes:
"Logically, the argument is persuasive, and Black has no trouble urging that "[w]hen the directive of equality cannot be followed without displeasing the whitest, then something that can be called a 'freedom' of the whitest must be impaired. It is precisely here, though, that many whites part company with Professor Black. Whites may agree in the abstract that blacks are citizens and are entitled to constitutional protection against racial discrimination, but few are willing to recognize that racial segregation is much more than a series of quaint customs that can be remedied effectively without altering the status of whites. The extent of this unwillingness is illustrated by the controversy over affirmative action programs, particularly those where identifiable whites must step aside for blacks they deem less qualified or less deserving. Whites simply cannot envision the personal responsibility and the potential sacrifice inherent in Black's conclusion that true equality for blacks will require the surrender of racism‑granted privileges for whites."3
Basically, Bell is saying that white people must step aside so that African Americans can be made equal. In other words, he is advocating affirmative action and sounds eerily similar to Jeremiah Wright, President Obama's controversial former pastor.
Perhaps the clearest example of Bell's beliefs is shown by his short story, “Space Traders”. In this story, white Americans sell black Americans to space aliens in order to pay off the national debt. For Bell, this is not simply an unrealistic piece of fantasy. It is truly what he believes. In an interview on C-Span, Bell said that "My views, my perspective is so jarring that to simply state it is, is very upsetting and I find that I have a better chance of at least being heard if I can place those views in a fable, in a story." 4
Below is a segment of the HBO film “Cosmic Slop” based on "Space Traders" in which the Republican administration discusses selling all black men, women, and children to the aliens.
Remember, this is the same man whose words Barack Obama told us to open our hearts and minds to. Professor Derrick Bell is just one more name to add to the growing list of radicals that our president has associated with throughout his life.
Can America really survive another four years of this?
~Addie
"I've accepted that as my motto 'I live to harass white folks'" ~Derrick Bell
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Bell
2 http://www.emich.edu/coe/powerplay/docs/vol_4/issue_1/10_stokes.pdf
3 http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~jweiss/laws131/unit3/bell.htm
4 http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV?id={3FD26D07-E8D6-4321-9EAC-EEC2F29396A5}&title=DerrickBell I Put My Views In Book Because Theyre Too Threatening To General Populace