Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:53 — 10.0MB)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here.
Continuing from part one on Faces At the Bottom of the Well (1992) with guest Lawrence Ware. We discuss "The Racial Preference Licensing Act" (ch. 3), which plays with an idea (attributed to his fictional alter ego Geneva Crenshaw) that since businesses continue to discriminate (in hiring if not in excluding clientele), maybe we should license the activity, so a business that wants to be racist will have to a) declare it, b) be consistently racist, and c) pay into a reparations fund, e.g. to black educational institutions. Would such a proposal actually deal more honestly with this intractable problem?
In the full episode, we also cover "Divining a Racial Realism Theory" (ch. 5), and "The Rules of Racial Standing" (ch. 6).
Ch. 5 depicts Bell debating a different fictional character, the gun-toting Erika Wechsler who meets the description of today's Antifa. Her "racial realism" is an excuse to compare today's situation with regard to the failure of civil rights laws to achieve desired effects to the arguments of legal realists in 1930s who objected to the classical structure of law as formal group of "common law" rules. Clearly during the Great Depression, circumstances required government to go beyond its usual role to meet human need, yet conservative courts could not interpret the Constitution to allow these necessary actions to take place.
Finally, ch. 6 discusses the political rhetoric as it applies to race: Blacks' accounts of racial discrimination inevitably are thought of as requiring white support or need to be "taken with a grain of salt," since black people are interpreted as biased in this area. The exception is when a black person speaks out against other blacks, at which point whites amplify that voice. Finally, whenever a black speaker says something that upsets white people, whites demand that all other black figures denounce the offending speaker.
Seth, I literally posted on Twitter about how I had never studied any Derrick Bell before right before you mentioned it in this Derrick Bell discussion.
These episodes were a great introduction to Derrick Bell and I am glad you are dealing with these contemporary topics as well as Hegel and Aristotle. I was, however, disappointed in the way you all just dismissed John McWhorter’s work because he doesn’t agree with the progressive mainstream rather than taking his arguments seriously and showing why you think he is wrong. If the podcast has room for such disparate thinkers as Hegel and Levinas then there must be room for Bell and McWhorter. Those of us who don’t live in progressive bubbles have to encounter these arguments all the time and can’t dismiss them so easily, nor do we convince anyone of anything if we do.
That was sloppily done on our part. The point (in my mind) was not to dismiss McWhorter but to use him as a potential example to see if Bell’s rules of racial standing make sense. Whatever the quality of McWhorter’s thought, do you really think he would be as famous if he were not an African-American making these kinds of political claims? Bell claims no. I suggested we actually try to get McWhorter on the show, but none of my co-hosts seemed too interested in giving further airtime to what is essentially a political dispute. I think we treated him charitably back in our White Privilege episode where we actually read one of his articles.
I haven’t listened for a while, but the topic of race has drawn me in for some time and I continue to learn more. Having listened to this episode I plan on reading Faces At the Bottom of the Well. I enjoyed your collected reflections on the podcasts you have done with Lawrence in the past specifically the admission of your misunderstanding of issue of race having its own well of philosophical texts. I am interested in Seth’s comment about not having been aware/assigned some of the texts when he was younger in light of his strong reaction some years ago to the student lead challenge to the curriculum at Reed. I ask as a fan not a critic. I hope my kids want to go to Reed or a school with a reputation like it and after hearing his admission of ignorance immediately wondered if he has a different since of that moment. Thanks for all that you do.