We Should Defend Our Own: Smearing late Derrick Bell latest salvo When will blacks fight back?

There is such a thing as honor. And when the honor of a great man is attacked, there must be a response.

Professor Derrick Bell, who passed away last October, was a great man. His legacy to the legal profession, to civil rights law and thinking, to legal scholarship, to the hundreds of students he taught and the scores of black leaders, academics and activists he mentored, cannot be calculated. He refused to compromise with racism by studying it, resisting it and showing us how to build a life filled with joy, humor and integrity, while wrestling with our nation's most ugly and intractable problem.

So when the likes of Fox News analysts, Sarah Palin and muckraking bloggers launched a smear campaign against professor Bell, it should not be treated as politics as usual. So far, the defense of Bell's good name has fallen to his beloved wife, Janet Dewart Bell, who offered a powerful and moving account of Derrick's life and trenchant critique of the right-wing smear machine, and professor Charles Ogletree, who challenged Bell's detractors directly before Fox viewers.

Bell, an ardent student and lover of gospel music, would understand when I say that if those of us who have been touched and influenced by his life and work do not vigorously speak out in his defense, "the stones will cry out."

The source of the smear campaign against Bell was the late Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing provocateur for whom the truth seemed often a mere annoyance and for whom character assassination was his stock in trade. Several years ago, Breitbart set his sights on ACORN, the fair-housing organizing group, whose voter-participation efforts many credit with registering thousands of Obama voters in 2008. For the most virulent on the right, dismantling ACORN was a post-election priority....

Professor Sherrilyn A. Ifill

ops, they it is... ops, they it is... ops, they it is...

Another Black Racialist Prof!!

Most blacks out in the work-a-day world, don't stew in the past and live peaceably with their neighbors... but in the halls of academe Racialist Eggheads can't grasp that reality... they daily weave tales of modern racism... sad...

If your were from Mars and hearing folks like Bell, Rev. Right, Farrakhan or Obama, you'd think that all humanity were split into two camps, the whites and the blacks. And that the whites are lording it over the blacks with whips and branding irons, and blacks were staging a war to free themselves.

In reality, a world far apart from the one Egghead Profs inhabit, whites agonize over the past, so much so, that they are willing to give a black marxist a chance at running the country, even though it means sure ruin... the real problem is that powerful blacks understand white guilt and play it for all its worth... which isn't a bad ploy if you have marxist designs on the world and are looking for a tool that can yield grand results.

Racial-Quota Fallout
How Derrick Bell became Derrick Bell
By Thomas Sowell

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/293539/racial-quota-fallout-thomas-sowell

Many years ago, I learned of an episode in the life of a promising young black man that is relevant to things happening now. He had been educated at a good school, and went on to receive degrees at good colleges and universities. Then he went for a Ph.D. in mathematics at one of the leading departments in that field.

When he encountered difficulties, his professors essentially wrote his doctoral thesis for him. No doubt they felt good about doing something to help a promising young black man, and perhaps took pride in doing so. But what about his pride?

This young man ended up joining an extremist group that hated white people.

Would it have been worse if he had not gotten a Ph.D. in math? Probably 99 percent of the people in this country, regardless of race, could not get a Ph.D. in math — and yet they can still live happy and fulfilling lives.

What recalled this episode from long ago was the current flurry of interest in a video of a young Barack Obama at Harvard Law School praising Derrick Bell, a black professor there whose writings on “critical race theory” promoted an extremist hostility to white people.

Derrick Bell was for years a civil-rights lawyer, but not an academic legal scholar of the sort who gets appointed as a full professor at one of the leading law schools. Yet he became a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and was a full professor at Harvard Law School.

It was transparently obvious in both cases that his appointment was because he was black, not because he had the qualifications that got other people appointed to these faculties. At Stanford, his students complained that his course on constitutional law was not up to the standards of the other courses they were taking.

Stanford at that time had one of the leading scholars in constitutional law, Professor Gerald Gunther — and Derrick Bell was no Gerald Gunther. A hastily created program of study of constitutional law was then used to teach that subject to students who were not getting what they needed in Professor Bell’s course.

When this clever finessing of the problem came to light, the administration apologized — to Derrick Bell for the embarrassment this caused him.

They should have apologized to the law students for short-changing them with a professor who was not up to the job — and to those who donated money to the university to advance the cause of education, not to allow administrators to play racial-quota politics on campus.

As a full professor at Harvard Law, Derrick Bell was also surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either the faculty or the students — or, more important, his own self-respect. Bell himself admitted that he did not have the scholarly credentials that most full professors at Harvard Law have.

There were no doubt other law schools where he would have been a respected colleague, but they were not Stanford or Harvard. Yet it is worth remembering that millions of people have led happy and fulfilling lives without ever being at Harvard or Stanford.

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil-rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Bell even said that he took it as his mission to say things to annoy white people. Perhaps he thought that was better than being insignificant in his academic setting. But it was in fact far worse, because the real damage was to impressionable young blacks who took him seriously, including one who went on to become president of the United States.

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