"Reis Ipsa Loquitor” — the thing speaks for itself.
Last September, New Yorker writer, Jelani Cobb wrote — The Man Behind Critical Race Theory. It was an excellent piece on Professor Derrick Bell and what Critical Race Theory (C.R.T.) actually is. Given the advent of this already-tumultuous Black History Month — I’m glad I saved it.
Let’s explore it a little so we can, at least agree what it is, versus what the hayell is making so-called white folk in these divided states of America lose their damned minds today over teaching true history.
Cobb begins by introducing Derrick Bell, “a young attorney with the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York City,” who thought he was fighting a case for integration in a Harmony, MS public school system.
Turns out, that’s neither what the school, nor the formerly enslaved, Black community in which it stood, wanted. They wanted to be left the hell alone to educate their young, within, and by — the culture in which they’d been raised.
In a revealing, “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good kind of way,” Bell’s subsequent victory in Hudson v. Leake County School Board was his first inclination that maybe, just maybe — he’d made a big mistake.
Why? Because, as Cobb wrote, “such rulings sparked white flight from the public schools and the creation of private “segregation academies,” which meant that Black students still attended institutions that were effectively separate.”
I must interject here, that in 1974, I graduated Valedictorian, while my brother skipped a grade saying, “You ain’t leaving me here by my damned self!” — graduating Salutatorian with me, from M. Rutledge Rivers High School in Charleston, SC — which was previously one of those private, “segregation academies.”
As such, I can attest to Bell’s misgivings — because white flight did happen, particularly after we became the second Black family to move into what I call our ”Movin’ On Up” neighborhood around the corner from the school. And, as Bell predicted — we ended up still attending an institution that was effectively separate (much to my heart’s delight as it turned out, cuz I’m certain had it not worked out that way, I would’ve never met, through my English teacher, Mrs. Alfreda Jenkins — the likes of Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, W. E. B. Du Bois and many other greats).
Please read Millicent Brown’s not so -- Ruby Bridges story of integrating our, very own “segregation academy” that was Rivers High School on September 3, 1963 . I was seven years old, sittin’ on that linoleum floor, at 94 Reid St., watching it happen on our little, Black & White, Zenith TV.
According to Cobb:
Bell spent the second half of his career as an academic and, over time, he came to recognize that other decisions in landmark civil-rights cases were of limited practical impact. He drew an unsettling conclusion: racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. Racism, he began to argue, is permanent. (emphasis mine)
As unsettling as that conclusion was for Bell, think of the over-abundance of evidence that points to it being exactly true for us — even until today. Exhibit A would be that link up there, about the bomb threats to HBCUs made during the “advent of this already-tumultuous Black History Month.”
Bomb a church in Birmingham, killing four little Black girls, check. Threaten to bomb several schools that teach young, Black folk, including young girls, check (these Mofos are obsessed with bombing “colored folk” — at home and abroad, ain’t they??). {SMDH}
Think about it, Fam — we fought for the right to educate, as well as celebrate, our lived experiences in, and contributions to, this country thanks to Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History Week. And through a successive wave of reform, it became Black History Month. However, because as Bell asserted, “racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society, it has been able to reassert itself” yet again with all of this crazed, vitriol against Critical Race Theory (C.R.T.) these folks have been spewing, just to make sure our stories can’t legally be taught in schools. Pretty much cancels out Black History Month, no?
Even though, as Cobb continues:
After more than a quarter of a century, there is an extensive academic field of literature cataloguing C.R.T.’s insights into the contradictions of anti-discrimination law and the complexities of legal advocacy for social justice. (emphasis mine)…
So-called “white folk” (more on that later) keep on lying that it’s being taught to their children in schools, K-12, to shame them and make them feel “uncomfortable.” Am I the only one that recognized the words “anti-discrimination LAW” and “LEGAL ADVOCACY” in C.R.T.’s insights? C.R.T. is teaching about LEGAL SYSTEMS of discrimination in LAW SCHOOLS!
But these fools want to paint our simply teaching and sharing our true history and contributions to America as C.R.T.’s assault against their children (somebody learned some new words somewhere.). Is Bell’s conclusion that “racism is permanent” on point? You tell me.
Cobb reminds us further:
For the past several months, however, conservatives have been waging war on a wide-ranging set of claims that they wrongly ascribe to critical race theory, while barely mentioning the body of scholarship behind it or even Bell’s name. As Christopher F. Rufo, an activist who launched the recent crusade, said on Twitter, the goal from the start was to distort the idea into an absurdist touchstone. “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. Accordingly, C.R.T. has been defined as Black-supremacist racism, false history, and the terrible apotheosis of wokeness. (emphasis mine)
Ask yourself, Fam, have you EVER heard any of these fools either in Congress, or at school board meetings, mention Derrick Bell’s name in their racist psycho-babble? Save your breath, that’d be a Hayell No! And that’s because they don’t know it, or care to know it. Nor do they care to know that C.R.T. is a university-level academic discipline based on the idea that racism is embedded in U.S. legal and other structures. All they care about is continuing to dumb-down themselves and their poor children in the name of their waning white supremacy. It’s times like these that I keep hearing my departed Grandmama asking white Jesus to please, “take the wheel.”
James Baldwin spoke wa-a-ay more succinctly and eloquently than I ever could, about why so-called white folk are losing their damned minds today over race.
In his seminal, “On Being White and Other Lies,” he eviscerates whiteness and lays bare the weakness in white leadership under which we continue to labor — for our lives.
“No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.
It is probable that it is the Jewish community or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants — that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate. (emphasis mine)
A side-note here, this is how the EGOT, Whoopie Goldberg, recently got got. Because the Jews became white and operated as such, Black folk see them as white people. Goldberg said the Holocaust wasn't about race — because, after paying the price of the ticket (becoming white), they operated as white people here in America. So, in her allyship, she uttered the words no Jew would entertain as true (though Whoopie and countless other Black Americans see how they operate as white folk) — the Holocaust was a “man’s inhumanity to man” thing, versus a race thing. And I agree with her, because even though the NAZIS deemed them as an inferior “race” — when they got here, they operated as white folk. Either it’s religious persecution or racial persecution, y’all gotta pick, or probably not, given “white” America’s fealty to them Benjamins (yeah I said it!).
Since I’d hate to waste nary a day of our only, 28-day celebration of Black History Month, I’d like to share a little Bryan Stevenson on Critical Race Theory — and some other powerful things:
As you listen, notice the same, damned “bomb threats” bullshit at the 2:48 time hack. I'm tellin’ y’all — THEY ARE OBSESSED!
At the 4:12 time hack, we hear Brian Stevenson say: “We just had the 20th anniversary of 9/11…We believe in memorializtion in this country.”
To which Pogue replies: “But that’s different… It’s easier for Americans to memorialize something that was done to us, than it is to memorialize something we did to others.” (Mighty f*ckin Mitch McConnell of you there Pogue!)
Mr. Pogue, and I give you that respect, grudgingly — therein lies the rub, We(Black people of the United States) are Americans. These atrocities were/are committed against/done to “Americans”.
Cobb continues:
People who looked at the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and others and concluded that they were not anomalies but evidence that the system was functioning as it was designed to, were articulating the conclusion that Bell had drawn decades earlier.
Bell, who died in 2011, at the age of eighty, would have been less focussed on the fact that white politicians responded to that reckoning by curtailing discussions of race in public schools than that they did so in conjunction with a larger effort to shore up the political structures that disadvantage African Americans. Another irony is that C.R.T. has become a fixation of conservatives despite the fact that some of its sharpest critiques were directed at the ultimate failings of liberalism, beginning with Bell’s own early involvement with one of its most heralded achievements.“The gap between words and reality in the American project — that is what critical race theory is, where it lies,” Perry told me. The gap persists and, consequently, Bell’s perspective retains its relevance. Even after his death, it has been far easier to disagree with him than to prove him wrong.
Vinay Harpalani told me, “Someone asked him once, ‘What do you say about critical race theory?’ ” Bell first replied, “I don’t know what that is,” but then offered, “To me, it means telling the truth, even in the face of criticism.”
And isn’t that ALL it is, Fam? Just isn’t it?? White folk don’t want their children to learn what f*kin’ racists, white suptemacists, muderers, they’re ancestors have always been. Too late to be ashamed now Mofos — your children SEE YOU!
What’s really going on today in these divided states of America is Derrick Bell’s, “Critical Race Theory” writ large -- which I reiterate here: “Racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. Racism is permanent.”
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