How Derrick Bell, the Antisemitic Father of Critical Race Theory, created Neoliberal Identitarianism — with a little help from Kimberlé Crenshaw

Derrick Bell would be famous if the right had more reason to hate him and the left had less reason to forget him. Praised by Barack Obama, Bell has been called the Father of Critical Race Theory, though he did not give it that name.

Bell began with the best intentions. One of his critics, black conservative lawyer Winkfield F. Twyman, Jr., noted,

Bell had come out of the litigation struggle during the 1960s. Rightly concerned with the “snail pace” of racial progress, he began writing arguments critical of traditional civil rights law. He continued his provocative work after his appointment to the Harvard Law School faculty in 1969 and tenure in 1971. … Because he taught at the premier law school in the country, Bell’s thoughts had a disproportionate impact on the best and the brightest black law students.

Bell believed,

Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than ‘temporary peaks of progress,’ short lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance … white self-interest will prevail over black rights.

Bell called his beliefs Racial Realism, but someone must have noticed that “racial realism” is the same name former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke used for his beliefs. Bell’s protegé, Kimberlé Crenshaw, gets the credit for creating the more academic name, Critical Race Theory.

The UCLA School of Public Affairs’ “What is Critical Race Theory?” provides this definition:

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.

Critical Race Theorists say their realism explains why the wealth gap between whites and blacks changed very little after the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King had one answer — in 1967, he wrote, “In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.” King was very aware that limited class mobility explained both white and black poverty. His solution to poverty was “to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

But Bell had no interest in socialism. He said, “I think there must be value in Marxist and other writings, but I did not really read them in college and have had little time since.” That seems surprising if you notice that his heroes included black socialists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. But many black liberals celebrate black socialists who opposed racial privilege and ignore their criticism of economic privilege.

Like all secular cults, Critical Race Theory promotes a simplistic understanding of reality by relying on memoirs and fiction. Bell’s short story, “The Space Traders”, is a CRT sacred text about an alien race that offers wealth to humanity at the price of carrying off the Earth’s black people. The world’s white people—and, I assume, Asian people as well—agree to the deal. The story is a parable that only works for readers who have already accepted its premise that now and forever, white people are prepared to sell black people. (Full disclosure: I tried to read the story, but Bell’s storytelling seems painfully amateurish to me. My summary is based on what I’ve read about it.)

Bell began to develop his “racial realism” in the late ’70s and early ’80s when neoliberalism was being adopted by both of the US’s political parties under Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve for Carter and Reagan. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey notes that identitarianism goes hand in hand with neoliberalism:

Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multi-culturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.

Bell’s neoliberal take on racism may explain his success in academia. Instead of teaching upper-class students to share their wealth with the racially diverse working-class, he taught privileged whites to apologize for their “white privilege” and privileged blacks to believe, as Adolph Reed Jr. put it, “that one’s career advancement literally embodies the victory of the civil rights movement.”

Critical Race Theory’s name worked well in academia, where it sounded like the older Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School that it has nothing in common with. But beyond the ivory towers, CRT’s name has too many syllables. Its believers began to discuss it as “anti-racism”, a word that was rarely used before the 1980s. During the civil rights struggles, people defined themselves by the issues they supported: integration, peace, socialism, feminism, gay rights, etc. But Critical Race Theory’s goal was always nebulous. CR Theorists found it easier to name themselves for what they opposed, so they called themselves anti-racists, which had a rhetorical effect that benefited them: by implication, anyone who criticizes their approach to opposing racism is racist.

Because race reductionists think white people aren’t qualified to discuss racism unless they are “allies” who share their faith, I’ll quote a few of their critics of color.

Adolph Reed Jr. wrote in “The limits of anti-racism”:

The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention.

Unitarian Universalist Reverend Thandeka wrote in “Why Anti-Racism Will Fail”:

…they make an erroneous assumption about the nature and structure of power in America… they misinterpret actions resulting from feelings of shame and powerlessness as evidence of white racism… The privilege that, according to the anti-racists, comes with membership in white America, actually belongs to a tiny elite.

In “Anti-racism has to go beyond a facile representation game”, Priyamvada Gopal wrote:

Anti-racist politics has become a facile “representation” game that involves appeasing the fragile sensitivities of a vocal few claiming to represent the whole community. It is about harassing artists and writers, demanding that they conform to “right” ways of representing the community.

In “The Lightness of Critical Race Theory”, Winkfield F. Twyman, Jr. wrote:

Our best and brightest … should not be spending their energies planning the next hot Critical Race Theory workshop where the irrelevant write for one another.

CRT’s race reductionist approach to justice made it easy for Kimberle Crenshaw to fuse CRT with the gender reductionism of 1980s feminism. She saw sexism and racism as unique forms of oppression, entirely disconnected from class or commerce, and only black women existed at their intersection. In “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, she explained:

Among the most troubling political consequences of the failure of anti-racist and feminist discourses to address the intersections of race and gender is the fact that, to the extent they can forward the interests of “people of color” and “women,” respectively, one analysis often implicitly denies the validity of the other. The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women.

Crenshaw’s intersectionality was embraced by Ivy League theorists of every social identity that could claim to be oppressed. This created a new problem: Is a handicapped person more oppressed than a lesbian? Is a light-skinned black person less oppressed than one who is dark-skinned? The solution was to avoid comparisons—the popular rule is “Don’t play Oppression Olympics”, but that rule, like most rules, is often broken.

The greatest problem for intersectionalists came when critics to their left and right pointed out they were ignoring the role of class in America. Because rich academics love their privileges of wealth, they fell back on the approach of the 19th century promoters of noblesse oblige. The problem, they say, is not class, which they see as natural and desirable—who would bring their brunch or clean their homes in a system without poor people? They say the problem is classism, formerly known as snobbery, the prejudice against people of the lower classes. So intersectionalists believe poor people should be given the same respect that’s due to people of every social identity and ignore the facts that economic class and social identity are not the same, and most poor people want their poverty ended rather than respected.

Since coining “intersectionality”, Kimberlé Crenshaw has enjoyed the privileged life that her Harvard education prepared her for. In 2020, she endorsed a Presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren—a white woman who calls herself a capitalist to her bones and whose base of support was far whiter and wealthier than Bernie Sanders’.

Derrick Bell also enjoyed a privileged life, but his fawning admiration of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan made him an embarrassment to the liberal identitarian movement. In 1992, Bell wrote,

Smart and super articulate, Minister Farrakhan is perhaps the best living example of a black man ready, willing and able to ‘tell it like it is’ regarding who is responsible for racism in this country.

Farrakhan’s ability to “tell it like it is” was profoundly antisemitic — he was Elijah Muhammad’s heir in all ways. The Anti-Defamation League’s Farrakhan In His Own Words includes this:

During his keynote address to 18,000 people at the NOI’s 2014 Saviours’ Day convention at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Farrakhan likened himself to auto magnate Henry Ford, who promoted anti-Semitic conspiracies in the 1920s in The International Jew: the World’s Foremost Problem. Farrakhan called Ford “a great man who was called an anti-Semite” and added, “I feel like I’m in good company.” In Part 2 of his Saviours’ Day address at Mosque Maryam in Chicago, Farrakhan received a standing ovation after telling his audience that “the Satanic Jews that control everything and mostly everybody, if they are your enemy, then you must be somebody.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center provides more examples of Farrakhan telling it like Derrick Bell thought it is:

“The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters … the Jews got a stranglehold on the Congress.” — Louis Farrakhan, Saviour’s Day speech, Chicago, Feb. 25, 1990

“And you do with me as is written, but remember that I have warned you that Allah will punish you. You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell. But I warn you in the name of Allah, you would be wise to leave me alone. But if you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you.” — Louis Farrakhan, Saviour’s Day speech, Chicago, Feb. 25, 1996

“And the Christian right, with your blindness to that wicked state of Israel … can that be the holy land, and you have gay parades, and want to permit to have a gay parade in Jerusalem when no prophet ever sanctioned that behavior. How can that be the Israel, how can that be Jerusalem with secular people running the holy land when it should be the holy people running the holy land. That land is gonna be cleansed with blood!” — Louis Farrakhan, Saviour’s Day speech, Chicago, Feb. 26, 2006

“We can now present to our people and the world a true, undeniable record of the relationship between Blacks and Jews from their own mouths and pens. These scholars, Rabbis and historians [that Nation of Islam researchers studied] have given to us an undeniable record of Jewish anti-Black behavior, starting with the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, the labor movement of the North and South, the unions and the misuse of our people that continues to this very moment.” — Letter sent by Louis Farrakahn to Jewish leaders and the Southern Poverty Law Center, June 24, 2010.

That Bell should admire Farrakhan should not surprise anyone—Bell believed all white people are racist and Farrakhan believes all white people are devils. Critical Race Theory and the Nation of Islam are both identity cults. The major difference is NOI is a religious cult that teaches white racism comes from an evil scientist named Yakub who created all white devils, while CRT is a secular cult that teaches white racism is a system perpetuated by white racism in an unending cycle.

Bell’s defenders insist he was not antisemitic and the apparent antisemitism in his work is a misunderstanding, but the need to defend Bell’s praise of Farrakhan combined with Bell’s refusal to condemn Farrakhan’s antisemitism made Bell a problematic public hero for anyone who claims to be antiracist. When Bell died, his identitarian followers began promoting a new origin story in which the less-influential Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbians who first used the term “identity politics”, are the founders of the identitarianism that neoliberals like Hillary Clinton promote.

Critical Race Theory’s conservative critics also lost interest in Bell when he died. His endorsement of Farrakhan initially made Bell an ideal target for the right, especially for Jewish conservatives, but Bell’s support for capitalism made him less than ideal for people who love to hate communists. The “critical theory” in Critical Race Theory’s name pointed to a better demon for them, Theodor Adorno, Director of the Frankfort School that was a center for Marxists who originated the older Critical Theory. So today conservatives write about Critical Race Theory much as they used to write about fluoride in drinking water as a commie plot to destroy America.

Bell has been neglected, but his ideas live on. If there’s an afterlife for race reductionists, he is in Heaven laughing or Hell fuming because the most popular teachers of his beliefs are white people like Tim Wise, Peggy McIntosh, and Robin DiAngelo, and they never give him the credit he deserves.

Bonus: Adolph Reed said in On the “New Jim Crow”: An Interview,

I remember I was at a conference a number of years ago at Harvard Law School when Derrick Bell was still on the faculty there. Bell was on a panel at this conference, and he insisted that nothing really had changed for black Americans since 1865. And I’m looking at this — here he was, a full professor at Harvard Law School, making the assertion that nothing had changed. Well, obviously something had changed, because he was in Harvard Law School without a broom in his hand.

More on Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders” and his Antisemitism

Bell’s most famous story is “The Space Traders.” Charlie Jane Anders says it’s “one of the most disturbing thought experiments in science fiction, which later became an HBO TV special. In “The Space Traders,” aliens arrive and offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves.” The U.S. just has to give the aliens one thing in return: all of our black people. (Guess what white Americans decide?)”

Bell’s assumptions can be seen in this paragraph from the story:

“But whites, long conditioned to discounting any statements of blacks unconfirmed by other whites, chose now, of course, to follow their own perceptions. “Will the blacks never be free of their silly superstitions?” whites asked one another with condescending smiles. “Here, in this truly historic moment, when America has been selected as the site for this planet’s first contact with people from another world, the blacks just revert to their primitive fear and foolishness.” Thus, the blacks’ outrage was discounted in this crisis; they had, as usual, no credibility.”

The story might be plausible if it was set during Jim Crow. Bell never accepted that the world had changed.

Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in the New York Times, “Consider the ‘’Space Traders’’ story. How does one have a meaningful dialogue with Derrick Bell? Because his thesis is utterly untestable, one quickly reaches a dead end after either accepting or rejecting his assertion that white Americans would cheerfully sell all blacks to the aliens. The story is also a poke in the eye of American Jews, particularly those who risked life and limb by actively participating in the civil rights protests of the 1960’s. Bell clearly implies that this was done out of tawdry self-interest. Perhaps most galling is Bell’s insensitivity in making the symbol of Jewish hypocrisy the little girl who perished in the Holocaust — as close to a saint as Jews have. A Jewish professor who invoked the name of Rosa Parks so derisively would be bitterly condemned — and rightly so.”

Bell’s defenders note that his story mentions a rabbi who wants to protect blacks, but they ignore Bell’s conclusion: “The Jews who opposed the Trade were intimidated into silence and inaction.” Whether Bell meant that intimidation to exonerate Jews or damn them for accepting silence is unclear, but Jewish readers had reasons to be concerned about Bell.

In 1994, Bell said, “We should really appreciate the Louis Farrakhans and the Khalid Muhammads while we’ve got them.” At the time, Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, was famous for calling Jews “bloodsuckers”. Only a year before, Khalid Muhammad, Farrakhan’s National Assistant, had made a speech about South Africa, saying, “If they are white, kill ’em all. Why kill the women? Why kill the babies? They are just innocent blue-eyed babies? Because god dammit they are going to grow up one day to rule your babies. Kill them now. Why kill the women in South Africa? I say kill the women because the women are the military manufacturing center. And every nine months they lay down on their backs and reinforcement rolls out from between their legs, so shut down the military manufacturing center by killing the white woman.”

Previously: How Derrick Bell, the Antisemitic Father of Critical Race Theory, created Neoliberal Identitarianism — with a little help from Kimberlé Crenshaw

Three Kinds of Identity Politics: Traditional, Socialist, and Neoliberal