Ep. 278: Derrick Bell on the Dynamics of Racism (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 278 is something like, what is racism? And we read Derek Bell's collection of essays and stories, Faces at the Bottom of the well, the Permanence of racism from 1992. More information please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, whom the alien space traders demanded that the earth keep. Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, part of the new underground network of whites against racism in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey wanting to meet Geneva Crenshaw in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:48 Lawrence: This is Lawrence Ware, a black man.

0:53 Mark: I'm so threatened. Lawrence, welcome back.

0:57 Lawrence: What's up, guys? What's up, guys? Good to be back.

0:59 Dylan: Yes.

0:59 Seth: So good for you to have you on again.

1:01 Dylan: Yes. And we should note that the preamble. A bunch of guys who once thought about doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Well, Lawrence is doing philosophy for a living.

1:12 Seth: That's correct.

1:13 Lawrence: I am. Although I have now branched out and I'm now doing stuff for the New York Times. And I'm doing Africana stuff, so I'm doing philosophy still. I'm also doing Africana stuff, too.

1:23 Seth: Okay, this is might be the last time because you're getting too big for us. You're getting too famous.

1:29 Lawrence: No, no, no, no. I will never. I will never be too big for you guys. I'm always going to be here for you.

1:34 Mark: We had muse that too big. I consider this that twice rescheduled. It was. It was a rest. Some wrestling was involved with your schedule.

1:42 Lawrence: Yeah, I'm sorry. Well, last time I wasn't feeling as well. It's been rough. I mean, I do have to admit that I. I am kind of busy, so it is kind of hard to nail me down sometimes. But I will always have time for you guys if you guys have time for me. But apparently you guys don't have time for me because I haven't been on here. That's fine. It's fine. It's fine.

2:00 Seth: Well, let's not forget you have three kids. You're a professor, you're publishing, you're a pastor.

2:07 Lawrence: Not anymore. Not anymore, No. I mean, I still do stuff with the church, but not as busy with the church because remember, we're in a pandemic, so a lot of that is shut down.

2:16 Seth: That's true.

2:17 Mark: I was reflecting on how much has changed since 2012. February, the first time you came on this show with us, was that the first time? Yes, yes. Where we were like, philosophy of race, Is that really a part of philosophy?

2:31 Dylan: I am so happy you guys have

2:33 Lawrence: changed your mind on that. Welcome to the new world.

2:36 Mark: Isn't racism over? There were some.

2:39 Lawrence: And I had to show up and be like, no, racism is still here.

2:42 Mark: Well, you were discussing, I recall, like, certain older relatives who felt like that the 60s were right now and were expressing that. But just, you know, the kind of stuff that we were talking there has come so much more to the surface now. It is impossible to rest in the blissful ignorance that we were probably coming into that episode with at this point for any human being aware of media.

3:04 Lawrence: Although I will say that many people in the philosophy world still kind of ignorant when it comes to race now. They're getting better, but yeah, still a lot of work to be done with that.

3:14 Mark: So I reached out to you about something by Derek Bell, something in. Since critical race theory is now just huge in the news, and it seems like something that, you know, it has critical theory in it. It seems like something that philosophers should be aware of. And none of us had ever read any of the original texts. And of course, like any mass movement like what is now being taught in schools about it or argued about on the news, of course, as once or three or twice or three times removed from these original texts. Some of the individual practices that maybe school teachers around are then sort of the public discourse about that is even further removed. So, like, let's pick a text, go back, actually read it, discuss it as philosophers. And you recommended this one.

3:58 Lawrence: First of all, Derrick Bell, very famous African American, really law professor is really what he was. He went to law school, all that kind of stuff. He then went to Harvard, left Harvard in kind of like a. What was it? It was like a strike or something was going on because there was not enough faculty at Harvard. And he left there and went to nyu. That's where I met him. I knew Derrick Bell. Derrick Bell was a very, very kind person. He was the one who kind of convinced me, him and a couple other people. Cornel west was one also. George Yancy was another one.

That kind of convinced me to kind of go in the route that I'm going and doing Philosophy of Race, because they were doing this stuff well before it became kind of popular. He was kind of one of the foundational architects for critical race theory. And this book that we're talking about, the Faces at the Bottom of the well, is for all intents and Purposes like one of the most important kind of foundational texts when it comes to this. Now, Derrick Bell's a weird writer because he kind of does science fiction. He does short stories. He doesn't do the kind of the typical kind of writing where you're kind of presenting your ideas.

He kind of does it in a kind of different kind of way. But nevertheless, it's a very important text. Him with Kimberle Crenshaw and other individuals. Very important when it comes to this. And so I just think this is kind of a good starting place, like, if people are trying to figure out what it's about. This is a text that is taught all over. If you go into a philosophy or race class or any kind of class dealing with race, something from this text is going to be taught. And so it's absolutely just a foundational text, something to be kind of dealing with.

5:27 Mark: As I got into it, there were a number of references to this previous book, and we are not saved from the 80s that seem to be more straightforward. They maybe introduced this character, Geneva Crenshaw, who is this fictional somebody who was with him in the trenches in the 60s doing law for school desegregation, but plays the part mostly in this first in this and We Are Not Saved book, but then is reintroduced in the current book that we're discussing as someone who puts out more radical ideas than Bell actually wants to claim as his own. And then he will debate often with her.

So it really is like a lot of. It's not just, here's my screed. Whether it's Geneva or there are several other people that he has imagined conversations with. Some of them might even be real conversations. The first one was with a cab driver. It strikes one as like, there could be a person definitely like this. Maybe it's an amalgam of people. So he's, you know, thinking hard about trying to represent, I guess, on one side the traditional civil rights liberal position of colorblindness. And then these thoughts that sometimes are his, sometimes, or Geneva's, sometimes somebody else's, that, well, maybe we need something more extreme.

And so I think this is where, you know, some of the ideas come out of. Not these ideas specifically so much. But, you know, if people say critical race theory is illiberal because it is arguing against judge people based on their individual merit, that a cynic, whether it's Geneva or somebody else who's playing that role here is going to say, well, we've tried that, and we have to be realist about this, that if you Actually look at the economic data, right? Without economic equality, we cannot have real social equality. And whatever the good intentions of, say, Brown versus Board of Education, he writes a lot about that.

Well, the fact is that most schools are still de facto segregated. So it has not done its job. Even if there are no formal legal barriers and that there is a permanent underclass, even though there are many people of color that have risen economically that have done well, there is still this he thinks of as just a permanent people that are defined by their poverty, basically de facto caste system. And if what has been done so far has not been enough, then this has to be addressed in some other way. So it's a deliberation on what those ways could be and getting at aspects of that.

7:50 Dylan: And he will get to it. I think it's in chapter six where he's most explicit about this. He ties all of this to an inheritance of a long standing legal sort of philosophy of law challenge, you know, legal realism back in the 30s. And part of it is a question about how should our laws work and how should we be making our laws. And you know, what you described in sort of the practice versus theory problem. If we have laws that are intended to in part guide certain effects and those effects don't come about, then you have a couple choices. One is you have different laws.

But partly, I mean, his discussion of an argument that racism is permanent and that we need to face that is in part an argument that laws don't do the things that you want them to do. In fact, he argues later that. And I guess in five, the sort of conflict with the civil rights. There's a sort of civil rights era, civil rights activism kind of clash going on. And he says things like, well, I used to think that the law was the way to do this, but now I don't.

8:53 Seth: Here's the summarization portion for me. I thought we were reading this book to find out what critical race theory was so that we could understand why everybody had their panties in a wad about. I think it's already over with now, but about three months ago it was all the. All the rage in the news. I don't even know that the three words are strung together in this text in the same way.

9:15 Lawrence: No, not in the text, but it's kind of implied.

9:18 Seth: It's implied. So that's what I'm trying to get.

9:20 Dylan: Racial realism is the closest thing, right? What's called that he ties to legal realism, but racial realism is the closest thing.

9:27 Seth: But the basic premise is racism is not A behavior of individuals against other individuals. It's something that is systemic, but even going beyond systemic, which we've talked about before, it's something that makes possible modern American capitalist, whatever, democratic society as we call it. And as such, it cannot be eradicated without some kind of extremely radical transformation. And so his question is, what do you do in the face of something that you cannot change, but you still feel compelled to take action? Did I get that roughly right as the thesis of the book?

10:07 Lawrence: I think you're close. See, the thing is that if you wanted the straight up theoretical presentation of this is. Well, he probably doesn't. No, he doesn't quite say it in the previous book, but the previous book is the one where he kind of gives you kind of a systemic, kind of almost philosophical. But the more important book, I would argue, of the two, the one that most people have read, the one that most people have discussed is this one. And what this book does is kind of lays out what his ideas are. And he does it in some places, like with Space Traders. It's like a science fiction story. And Space Traders has been adapted to like, I remember there was like in the 80s or 90s there was a HBO special or something like that where they kind of depicted space traders. And then he also does it as kind of like a dialogue and kind of almost like Socratic kind of dialogue.

10:56 Mark: Yes, he does.

10:56 Lawrence: Where people are kind of going back and forth. And so he's playing with different forms, but the forms don't really matter. What really matters is, are the ideas that he's playing with. And one of the things that many, many, many people felt is that maybe he's too pessimistic in this book, that he's just laying out this kind of pessimistic kind of position and that we can really kind of overcome race and racism. And this is a book that came out, when was it? 92? 90 something.

11:21 Mark: Well, it's 92, but a bunch of the essays were published earlier. So I don't know. Space Traders in particular maybe was quite

11:27 Lawrence: a bit earlier, but the responders to people in 92 was that he was too pessimistic. Racism will get better, blah, blah, blah. And then, man, I mean, after that things completely hit the fan. I want to say that the LA riots were after the book was published. But anyway, or they may have been concurrent with when the book was published. I don't remember exactly. I'm getting old now, but just had a 40th birthday. But the point is nevertheless that many of his Ideas you're beginning to see are really beginning to take traction. And it was in Oklahoma, actually, where the first hubbub happened when it came to critical race theory.

And then of course, kind of spread to other states. But Oklahoma was one of the first states to kind of have this hubbub. And there was all these meetings at Oklahoma State University where I teach about Lawrence, are you going to be able to teach Derrick Bell Lawrence? You're going to be able to teach Kimberlé Crenshaw. What's your plan? All that kind of stuff now, stuff has died down. I don't think that if I were to bring this stuff. Well, I'm going to bring it up in about a week or so, but I don't think that when I bring this up that my students are going to remember, because I don't use the word critical race theory.

And if I walk in and say, today we're going to cover critical race theory, they would be like, whoa, wait a minute, you know. But I'm going to teach it anyway because it's what I've always taught. And this is just kind of a way to kind of get into what critical race theory, as opposed to, if you're looking for, like, an explicit philosophical articulation of what it's all about.

12:41 Mark: The point that Seth brought up, that's in the preface. He actually compares. Actually, I don't remember if he compared it, or I just compared my notes to Camus, but fighting for social justice whether or not you succeed. So even though he's pessimistic about it, he still thinks as a way of life die resisting. If our lot is complete annihilation, let us not behave in such a way that it seems justice. Well, what does that mean? And do we even have to care? Do we have to share his pessimism to find these musings about the philosophy of law versus its enforcement helpful?

No, I don't think we do at all. I think a lot of his. I can separate this out sort of as political commentary from as philosophy of law. You know, they're not entirely separable. But you could disagree about some of the observations. And of course, there are the fact that this stuff is talked about more now. I mean, he thinks that it is impossible for white people as a group to empathize with black people as a group. And so black people are just not able to enter into political coalitions because as soon as the white interests are not being served, then the black interest gets sacrificed.

And this is just something that he sees again and again through History, even back to the forming, you know, in the Constitutional Convention, like, it was so important to those guys to actually make the union work, that even though a lot of them were anti slavery, like, well, they not only let slavery be, but he identifies what 10 different places in the Constitution were specifically to make allowances for slavery. And that was the first in a long line he posed of compromises that whenever there's social ill, whenever there's economic uncertainty, then the interests of black folks are going to be disregarded.

And, you know, you might think that now, now that there's much more consciousness of this, maybe there is much more ability to empathize, but I wouldn't jump on. Look how much progress we've made. But now we don't have to talk about this anymore. Like, that is the basic first step of a thing to avoid. As a white person reading this, you're

14:44 Dylan: talking about let's avoid white splaining to Derrick Bell. Is that what you're saying?

14:49 Lawrence: Dead air.

14:50 Mark: I've been nervous about saying something asinine in my. I find myself wanting to anticipate comments that I've seen on Twitter and things in reaction to our past episodes and why. I think a lot of people really like that we do these kind of episodes on here. But then a lot of others are just like, oh, go do more ancient philosophy. Go do more traditional stuff.

15:10 Dylan: You know what? I heard a quote just recently while I was watching videos on disc golf because I'm trying to get better at disc golf. And the quote was this. Never take criticism from someone you would not take advice from.

15:24 Lawrence: It does sound reasonable. Yeah.

15:25 Dylan: So all those people that you were worried about, who criticizing Mark, let's not pay any attention to them because you wouldn't take advice from them. So let's not take their criticism.

15:35 Mark: Okay. I don't need to meta discuss for myths.

15:38 Lawrence: No, no, I think we should talk about it because. Okay, here's the thing. And Seth, I know you're coming. I'm gonna let you go in the second. Seth, One of the things that I noticed when I came on and we talked about race is that it was in opposition to when I came on and we were talking about like, Ricoeur and Jesus and stuff like that. One of the things I noticed is that when it came to race, people did not want to hear it. They wanted nothing to do with it. They were not interested in a discussion about race, even though, if you remember, it was Black History Month.

But they wanted nothing to do with that kind of discussion. When we talked about Jesus, they were all for it. It's fine. It's perfectly fine. Well, the reality is, is that if you are a black person in this country, you don't get to live a life where you don't have to talk about race. You have to talk about race. It's something that you must talk about. And there are black philosophers, and guess what they're talking about. So what you're saying is that you don't want to hear the experience of people who come up differently. And so I think that's an important discussion that needs to be had, that we need to talk about the fact that there may be people who are listening who don't want to hear this.

And that's fine if you don't want to hear it. Yo. I mean, you guys put out a number of different kinds of podcasts. I'll follow you guys. I get your emails about it. Listen to those podcasts. Just skip one week, whatever. But this is an important topic that is going to be here no matter whether you like it or not. Because of Trump, because of the reality of race in America. Because I guarantee you, in probably about a year to two years, there's gonna be another killing of an unarmed black man. I'm sorry. These discussions are going to continue to happen.

So we need to figure out a way to have these kind of discussions. Have them with rigor, make them philosophical, but we need to have these kind

17:08 Seth: of discussions for people who think race is not philosophical or there's not some philosophically appropriate way to approach race. I think this text, which jarred me at first, because it's not what I expected, actually, is a very structured and rigorous approach to the question of if you take the premise that racism is intractable, that it's systemic, it's institutional, it's. It's intractable, and that it creates this division where race supersedes class as far as affiliation, which is essentially what he says, Right? The whole concept of faces at the bottom of the well is that there has to be somebody at the bottom of the social hierarchy that other groups can look down on in order to have some sense of identity or affinity with other groups, and that blacks play that role in the United States.

And he says, really, what we need to overcome racism is for poor whites who also suffer the same economic and social hardships or similar economic and social hardships, to ally themselves with black folks and not with rich white people. But he says that's not going to happen. So that's premise number one. It's intractable. Then Question is, what do you do about it? And the first response is legal. So we've legislated civil rights law and, you know, voting rights and all these sorts of things. And his claim is you can't legislate it. You can't legislate racism out of existence for a number of reasons.

One is it's ultimately not a legal issue. It's. It's a moral issue. Secondly, if there's no enforcement of the law, then the law has no teeth. It doesn't matter. Right. You know, and many of the civil rights laws that were enacted over time were not enforced in certain jurisdictions. So it was a moot point. So then he goes on and says, all right, if you're in that predicament where you have this thing that you can't change but you have to respond to and legal matters don't work, what are some other avenues that we could explore? What are some other responses we could take?

And what he does, which is fascinating, is instead of a systemic, academic dry journey where he takes pros, cons arguments, he does a series of thought experiments. So each chapter tells a story about a potential, let's call it, response to this set of premises. And then there's a dialogue. It's a Platonic. I mean, it is a dialogue between characters about whether this particular approach is going to work or not work. And he as the central character, it's more nuanced than a Socratic dialogue because his interlocutors are not just saying yes and no or quite so, but ultimately he's playing kind of the role of the questioner.

And he keeps getting thrown in all these circumstances. And then after the episodic, fictional dialogic narrative takes place, he has a circle back with Geneva, who you can think of as any one of the number of characters that we've encountered through the history of philosophy. Right. Boethius had his or Socrates's daimon, or somebody who comes and makes sure that it's kind of the voice of reason and simultaneously a challenge and all that sort of thing. So to me, it was very structured. It's not traditional in its structure, but it is very structured, as.

Let me explore all these different ways to approach this question given the premises that are laid out. So it felt to me like very, very philosophical.

20:49 Lawrence: And really, that's what makes it so teachable is because, for example, in my class, when I teach, I use a lot of thought experiments, especially for, like, ethics and stuff, not so much for philosophy of race, but I use a lot of thought experiments and so to teach from this text, the way that he kind of lays his ideas out just makes it a very teachable text. I mean, you just put it up and we go through the story and the story is kind of engaging, especially like Space Traders. Space Traders is a very, very well taught text because it's just so vivid. And so you put it up, you present it to the students and then it kind of inspires dialogue. It's wonderful when it comes to pedagogy.

21:24 Mark: Yeah, let's talk about Space Traders first. Since you've brought this up, it's less an argument and more a vivid illustration of projecting into the future, projecting into a hypothetical, this sacrificing of black folks rights that in this other essay from and we are Not Saved, he had Geneva show up at the Constitutional Convention and argue with the founders about whether slavery stuff should be included in the Constitution. And they just say, yeah, it was the political exigencies of the moment. There were a number of things that required for the stability of the Union, for the creation of this caste system.

And so in this story, we imagine he kind of snarkily says, the economy has been hollowed out by laissez faire capitalism. The coffers are empty, the US is about to declare bankruptcy, we've wrecked the environment. We've just done all the things that liberals are worried that conservatives will happen. And these aliens come and they, they have wonderful technology, they can solve all of our problems. They have great riches and they're willing to give it all to us. If only America specifically will give up its entire black population to go away with the aliens, who knows where.

We are not going to tell you, say the aliens, what we're going to do with them. But you can't let them escape, you can't let them flee. They have to all, you know, be brought to the coasts where they can be loaded on our ships and then we will give you all this stuff. And so it's about the deliberations in this conservative government that has a prominently placed, not quite cabinet member, but sort of friend of the conservative government, African American who, you know, is regularly accused of being an Uncle Tom and sort of discusses the dynamics of his position, but ultimately he's not able to go along with the administration that wants to go for this deal that just says, if it were me, I would go.

It's just the country needs it and patriotism requires, you know, we have precedents. Putting the Japanese in internment camps, that's a precedent, you know, where we've have whole Groups that do something to sacrifice their freedom for the greater safety. And yeah, they just go through with it like it just happens. And they're all trotted. All the black people in the country are trotted, including this main character, Golightly, that's identified into the ships, made to strip down to their underwear and put in chains. So he said, you know, that they're leaving the country just like we came in.

So that was the summary. So what's the sort of point of entry for teaching this? What is the philosophical argument that we want to take out of this?

23:57 Lawrence: The main thing that I look at when I look at this particular text is how much do Americans value black people? Do they value them, their contributions, culturally, otherwise all that kind of stuff, enough to hold onto them, or do they value resources more? Because these space traders, they come and they're interested in giving us all this stuff to fix the planet and they have to turn into black people. And so one of the things that I always bring up with the students is how much do you think Americans, white Americans, value the contributions of black people, both culturally, both financially?

And of course, we know what Derrick Bell thinks. But that kind of, what that really, really does is that kind of makes the students I'm talking to, both black and white, really reflect on how much Americans value black people. And they look at the way that black art has been appropriated, and then white artists take it over and then they're like, okay, well, white artists can do that. What about the other contributions that black people have made? And so what many students find to their chagrin is that perhaps America doesn't value black people very much at all.

And that is when you have an opportunity to have a very interesting conversation. That's usually what is brought out. But there are many other things that you could bring out.

25:16 Dylan: One of the things that stood out to me about it was the way in which it would call out hypocrisy in a way that Bell also brings up in the Chronicle of the Constitutional Contradiction. And I'm trying to remember, I was trying to find where. Because I'm pretty sure Golightly, in one of his final speeches, makes the point that if the aliens had said, we want all the red haired people, right, or picked another slice, that there would have been just universal outrage. And so in that way, it's serving to highlight a kind of hypocrisy, that there would have been indignation and immediate refusal, out of hand, or considering them an enemy of the country, rather than even engaging in negotiations for saying well, we just want you to turn over 20% of your population by highlighting that hypocrisy.

To me, it makes it really powerful. I would also imagine that there would be a lively discussion about, in a class because it said, as in a future, how realistic people think it is. No, that wouldn't happen, or, yes, of course that would happen. I think it is that the introduction is brought up that Michelle Alexander, the answering that question also breaks along racial lines.

26:28 Lawrence: When I presented in class, almost to a class, the black students were like, yeah, that would absolutely happen. The white students like, no, that wouldn't happen. And so that absolutely comes down to racial lines.

26:39 Seth: I think what's interesting about this story is he lays it out so that the premise is the aliens land. And they say, you have 16 days to make a decision.

26:48 Dylan: We'll give you on Martin Luther King Day.

26:51 Seth: On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we'll

26:54 Lawrence: give you 16 days. Of course he does that. Of course he does that.

26:56 Seth: What I thought was really compelling about the description of it was the aliens come, they say, give us all the American black citizens and we'll give you all this stuff that'll heal the environment and fix this and unlimited energy and all this stuff. So really, the question they're posing, the thought experiment, is, would America trade its black citizens for technology, environmental safety, whatever, like, you know, what are they worth? But he doesn't abstract the conversation. He sets the whole dialogue in the context of the President's cabinet.

And one of the things I really like was him setting it up, talking about how the President ran on a campaign of a certain kind. By the way, there aren't actually any African Americans in his cabinet. And you have this character of the Department of the Interior, you know, the Minister of the Director or whatever it is they're called. And, you know, he's kind of highlighting these personalities and their archetypes. But for the purposes of the conversation he goes through, this is by far the longest section in the book. This chapter, he goes through how there would be the civil, the social, and then the political, and then the legal machinations.

In other words, how could we as a society make this decision? Yes, we want to justify giving up all of our black citizens to these aliens in exchange for this stuff. But do it with a clear conscience. Do it within the legal framework of America, because they're not asking anybody else on Earth. They're not asking the England or the French or the Gambians or the, you know, anybody like that. It's just America. So it is not an abstract Discourse or it's very, very much on point about talking about how would people actually argue this. And that's one of the things that's very powerful about the book is that even though the thought experiments are somewhat utra.

The way in which he describes the way people debate and argue and react to it are very much, I think descriptive of the way people would do it. And I think it really calls into question because if you have your initial reaction and then you read the reaction, you get plugged into it emotionally as well as philosophically. So I'm probably going to get lambasted. The last time I was sympathetic to an author it was Judith Butler and Michael Sandel. Everybody jumped down my throat.

29:18 Lawrence: So let them jump, man, let them jump.

29:21 Seth: Don't take criticism from anybody you wouldn't take advice from.

29:24 Lawrence: There you go. Dylan has revolutionized you guys life here.

29:27 Seth: Yeah, that's a T shirt slogan coming up.

29:30 Lawrence: Absolutely.

29:31 Mark: Bell's definitely, whether it's this realpolitik, he's definitely cynical about people's decision making that it is. A lot of it's just incentives is just based on. So some of the evaluation of should we let black citizens be taken away is like. Well, some people actually acknowledge the. Well, if we let them be taken away then the poor whites that remain won't have the scapegoat to distinguish themselves from socially anymore. So they'll start to get more dissatisfied with their lot and the whole apartheid system of rich versus poor that is basically set up will collapse.

That we need that buffer. That's the social, you know, in effect as if these people in these positions would state Bell's pet social analysis, which I don't think they. Even if it is true, they would not say that that is not something that they would argue specifically. So I guess Seth, I'm adding a little bit of. I think he's being a little more snarky.

30:27 Seth: See, this is the thing, I didn't feel that way.

30:30 Dylan: I do think in the scenario that he said in that offer that you would, if it happens tomorrow is you would see. At the very least, let's put aside whether or not what the final conclusion was in the, in the fight in society. I think you would see the themes and the voices that he describes, you would see those things said now, you know, he also presents stuff about the protests that are going on and how they fall on deaf ears in this particular administration. And it's a. I mean part of the theme is that, you know, there's a non trivial number of people who are adamantly opposed to this and are just blowing a gasket about it.

It's just that they're not able to. They're not the ones in power. They're not the powerful voice that might be an opening for some more optimism, that maybe that would turn in a different direction than his story does. Right. But I think the voices. I think what they say, you would hear all of those voices in such a discussion.

31:23 Lawrence: I agree. What do you guys think about that part of the story? I'm looking at it here, where he meets with black ministers, I believe it is. And he suggests that if black people pretend they're getting the best part of the deal, then white people will oppose it.

31:40 Dylan: He tries to get them to play the game to save themselves.

31:45 Lawrence: Exactly. And one of the things that a little bit inside baseball, one of the things that I've always been told from older black folks is that if white people feel as though they're getting the raw end of the deal, they will always side with themselves, getting the better end of the deal. So what he's doing here is very familiar to me as a black person. That's something I've heard my grandmother said before, My aunts and uncles have said before. Grandfather said that white folks always don't want black people to get the better deal, and so they will always team up when it comes to that. What did you guys think about that part of the story?

32:19 Dylan: I think it's reflective of Bell's general view that the outcomes of laws and stuff like that really are implicit and explicit negotiations for. For privilege and power. And so what you just described is something like if you lower the stakes a little bit, it's like every kind of negotiation that you have, right? Where a tried and true technique of negotiation is make sure the other person thinks they got the better deal as a technique for getting your own way. And that, to me, is just reflective of Bell's view. That's the only way in which things work.

I think if there was one thing that I would try to attribute to him is that laws don't work. It's all negotiations regarding power and status. I wasn't surprised that the preachers didn't agree because to me, they were sort of playing the place of the civil rights leaders in history. And he was playing the realist, you know, in the legal realism kind of critique. The other thing that made me think of was Odysseus. He was playing Odysseus to Achilles. He said, look, we gotta play the Trojan horse here, right? We gotta be why we gotta be wily on this, and this isn't a fair fight, and we've gotta figure out how to survive based upon convincing them.

And so we should. We should be sneaky in just that way.

33:35 Seth: The reason he's saying that is because it's a referendum, it's falling back into the legal realm. And he's a realist, but he's also. He's like a legal pessimist. And remember, the book starts with the concept of pessimism about civil rights. All the legislation only gets passed when there's some benefit to white people. There has to be something. So this strategy with respect to the referendum, because it ultimately comes to a referendum, there's that skepticism and pessimism about that process that the character of Golightly represents. And so he's.

He's saying, look, the system's rigged. So the approach you want to take, the noble approach of trying to marshal the resources and sway the people, is not going to work. The only way this is going to work is if we're able to make white people think that keeping black people here is in their best interest. That's the only way this will work, because that's the only way every other piece of legislation related to racial equality or voting rights or whatever civil rights has ever worked has ever passed. They're just too idealistic. They don't want to acknowledge that fact.

And I bought the audible version of this, too. You know, I was reading some of the reviews, and one of the people said that Bell is routinely sort of criticized for his pessimism, or for being. Not even pessimism, but nihilism.

35:00 Lawrence: Yeah, he's absolutely taken to task. I mean, black folks, Cornel west, they were friends, but he really did not like that pessimism because, you know, Cornel west is a Christian hope, blah, blah, blah. A person in the tradition of the civil rights movement. A Kingian, he calls himself. And Derrick Bell, as you see, by the way this story turns out, is not that. He is not a person who believes that protests and boycott gets you far anymore. He thought that was good at the time, but it won't get you far now. And so you see how the story turns out because of that.

35:29 Seth: Yeah, and that's exactly my point, is that the story plays out according to that same ideology. But I think, also take the evidence of the past. Who's more prophetic? Was it Bell or was it West? And by the way, I'm in love. I love Cornel West. I absolutely adore him. But Bell was prophetic in the way that he's. And it's not even prophetic because he's just essentially looking at the evidence that was given to him and he's projecting forward. So the story is really a narrative that's based in reality, based in fact, based in evidence. And that part where he interacts with those minister characters is very much like. Well, sorry about to go off on a tangent. Let me pause, because I don't want to. About whether King was. You know, I like tangents.

36:19 Lawrence: I like tangents. This is why I'm here. I come here for tangents.

36:22 Seth: So the question is, you know, West calls himself a Kingian, but would you call Martin Luther King conciliatory or would you call him revolutionary in some respects? Like, he's a complicated figure.

36:35 Lawrence: I think it depends what year you're talking about. Early King is conciliatory, later King is revolutionary. The King that Cornel west likes, he likes the conciliatory part of him, right?

36:44 Dylan: He likes the Selma bridge one.

36:46 Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, the Selma Bridge King. He's starting to flirt with revolutionaries at that point. Although, I mean, Cornel west is also a Marxist. I mean, I'm trying not to get too here on a tangent. So he's kind of revolutionary himself. I mean, so he's a Marx. I don't know if the people listening might get mad because I'm talking about Marx, or they might like, I don't know what's going on.

37:04 Mark: Well, but that's. I think that's an essential thing. When people say that critical race theory is anti American or something. Fundamentally what it means is this thing that until we get rid of this. I use the word apartheid, but this very strong 1% versus everybody else, huge wealth gap, then we're not going to be able to solve racism. And if we could just. He thinks that racism is one of the steam releases so that the white underclass doesn't get too dissatisfied with their lot. And so, yeah, you would have to do some significant income redistribution that, you know, conservatives in this country are going to call un American.

37:42 Lawrence: That's a very dangerous thing to say right now. It is so crazy how dangerous that is to say right now. But you're right. Which is part of the reason why critical race theory, okay, the people who don't like critical race theory, what I discover is they don't know a damn thing about critical race theory. The people who wrote the laws in Oklahoma, they don't know anything about. I was talking to them. They didn't know anything about critical race Theory, they know who Derrick Bell was, they never heard this story. They know the books, they know who Kimberlé Crenshaw was.

And so I think what's going on now to kind of apply it to what's happening in the country is that just the idea of this, not the actual content of it, but just the idea of it, it just so assaults the ideas that many white people, conservatives, I should say, have about just the life and what the America means. That's why they're opposed to it.

38:30 Dylan: How much of it do you think is the Marxist theme? Or is that kind of that knee jerked, pejorative, anti communist, anti Marxist theme is being pulled in against it? Or is it a sensitivity to, you know, a genuine theme in critical theory that is Marxist, but they're blowing it up. Being a socialist is a trigger word in our culture now. There's no way you can do that and have any kind of political capital. There's too much of the population, just like communists, just like Marxist, for which it's political dynamite. And there's no overcoming it. There's no way you can just be part of the normal, the mainstream political conversation and claim those terms and win and be successful. You could be local, you could be Bernie Sanders in Vermont and say I'm a socialist.

39:20 Lawrence: I was about to ask about that.

39:21 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, but you could be local. But if it's a big enough area, you can't do it.

39:25 Mark: Right.

39:25 Dylan: You know, you don't brand it that way.

39:26 Mark: But if it's guaranteed minimum income is going to come eventually. And with the pandemic relief stuff, we've seen the beginnings of that. And yes, that is totally dismissed as socialist. But given that, you know, the dominant political party, the non Sanders party, will not brand it that way, there's a lot that they could put forward. So you could even do something like reparations or whatever without. So there's, there's nothing in this text, I'm saying that says this is Marxist and that draws specifically on Marxist theory. It just says we need redistribution, we need to get rid of this intense gap between rich and poor and exploitation. So like can you redress those in ways that are not in any way socialist? I guess it's maybe it's partially a matter of branding.

40:08 Dylan: That was my question, is that how much of the knee jerk reaction against critical race theory is communism baiting? Right, Marxist baiting?

40:17 Lawrence: Yeah. Many of the people that I came into contact with, and this is not talking for everyone, but many people that came into contact with, they didn't even know that it had anything to do with Marx or redistribution of wealth. The main issue was just race. And I found. I'm trying to, like, not go too far into the political world here, but I found that the opposition to critical race theory was a byproduct of an opposition to what happened last summer and all that awakening around George Floyd. And so it was much more centered on that as opposed to what the actual theory is talking about. They just don't like it's called critical race theory. They just didn't like that part of it.

40:53 Dylan: Oh, so it's BLM backlash.

40:55 Lawrence: Yeah, that's what it is. That's what I felt it was.

40:57 Seth: Yeah. I get the strong sense, too, that there's nothing in what Bell is saying. He's talking specifically about America, but it's not clear to me that he's suggesting a Marxist alternative at all.

41:09 Lawrence: I don't think so. I don't think so.

41:10 Dylan: No, he's not.

41:12 Seth: And also not exempting socialist or Marxist societies from the same racial dynamic, because, let's face it, you know, say what you want about European socialism, many of those countries that over here we call socialist are colonial. And colonialism is essentially the foundation of. It's another way of establishing a racial hierarchy. And so I think it's been pretty well documented that when you look at, as you go further east, all societies have their racial hierarchies that serve some purpose regardless of the political system.

41:48 Mark: But we don't want to forget the sort of the liberal critique of this, which is you have folks like Sam Harris and some folks associated with this podcast, that the other thing that would be called anti American is that what America is about is complete race blindness. We want to be post racial. And so by doing anything like affirmative action, that is judging people not based on their individual merit, but is judging them by their membership in a class, by saying we have to redress historical ills by actually pointing out the differences. And this is illiberal.

This is what is pointed at. I think this is the main position that Bell himself represents in arguing with himself, that he's like, well, you know, traditional civil rights is just get rid of the legal barriers. Everybody joins hands, Nobody acknowledges race in any way, and get rid of the, you know, separate drinking fountains. It gets rid of, you know, a lot of overt racism. But this realpolitik is pointing out that that has not achieved, you know, removal of this permanent underclass or any of the other goals.

42:53 Dylan: Well, it's back to the theory versus practice problem. Right? You know, the legal realism question. It's in large part pointing out on the one hand the bluntness of law, that law matters, but it's not as effective as you think, especially with regards to things that amount to deeply moral issues. You can change the landscape, you can make a genuine difference, but it won't get you all the way there. You have the enforcement issue, you have the. It'll get you part way there, but not everywhere. And then the practice part. Part is observing that you're not getting the result that you want.

So you need to be much more pragmatic about it. And if you stick to the idealist, the theoretical ideal, navigating towards it will not get you the practical result that you want. That's the basic criticism. Instituting that theoretical ideal won't get you what you want. And the evidence they point to is they just point to a litany of practical consequences that don't happen and absurdities in the result of the law. One that wasn't at all related to race. But it made me think of, I got, I thought about when I was in that section of the book were things where modern forensic techniques, you know, like DNA sequencing and stuff, allows a person who's on, on death row to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are innocent.

But because the law says that they're only allowed three appeals and they've exhausted those appeals, they're barred from presenting this evidence in court because they don't have another appeal to make. And that kind of thing has happened numerous times.

44:36 Mark: We've only covered in detail one of the nine essay in here.

44:42 Lawrence: Well, to be honest, Space Traders is probably the most famous. So this should be. This is a pretty good intro, so I would be comfortable with this. Yeah, this is fine.

44:53 Seth: Yeah. But there's so much more.

44:55 Lawrence: There is, there is.

44:56 Mark: So we're definitely going to get into this, but we're going to do that in the second half of the discussion. So supporters just. It's the next thing your feed. If you're an Apple subscriber, you might not see us until next week, but it'll, it'll be there.