Posted on 03/25/2022 6:29:40 AM PDT by SJackson
The existence of a speech by Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, praising Derrick Bell, the godfather of critical race theory, and citing his book, “Faces At the Bottom of a Well”, as an influence has been widely reported. Conservatives have covered Bell's racist views, his praise for Farrakhan, his antisemitism, and attacks on America. Much of this was already hashed out during the exposure of the relationship between Barack Obama and Derrick Bell.
But it's important to specifically focus on Jackson's interest in "Faces At the Bottom of the Well."
In her speech, Jackson mentions that Bell, whom along with his wife she praises throughout her speech, "wrote a book in the early 1990s about the persistence of racism in American life".
The subtitle of the book, which few people have mentioned, is, "The Permanence Of Racism".
Persistence and permanence are not the same thing. But this is another example of Jackson subtly distorting Bell and his book in order to make their extremism seem more moderate.
Jackson goes on to say that, "My parents had this book on their coffee table for many years, and I remember staring at the image on the cover when I was growing up; I found it difficult to reconcile the image of the person,who seemed to be smiling, with the depressing message that the title and subtitle conveyed. I thought about this book cover again for the first time in forty years when I started preparing for this speech." That would have made her ten years old.
As others have pointed out, "Faces At the Bottom of the Well” was published when Jackson was in her early twenties during Bell’s tantrum against Harvard University. It’s unlikely that Biden’s Supreme Court nominee grew up with the hateful text, but it’s entirely plausible that she was influenced by the book which came out when she was at Harvard and then Harvard Law.
Since Bell began his racial strike against Harvard Law before she had completed her undergraduate degree, it’s unlikely that she had taken any of his classes, but the former member of the faculty was clearly an influence on her. Perhaps Jackson’s memory is faulty or she’s deliberately backdating the book’s influence to her childhood to make it seem more innocent. Surely no one could blame a ten year old for being attracted to a racialist text.
"Faces At the Bottom of the Well” is the sort of racist book that could conceivably appeal to a bright ten year old. Bell, despite his position, was never much of a legal or constitutional scholar, and Faces, like the preceding “And We Are Not Saved”, conveys its message that the constitution is just a facade for a white racist agenda through science fiction short stories.
Where "And We Are Not Saved" transports the protagonist back to the Constitutional Convention to denounce the Constitution, "Faces At the Bottom of the Well” indulges in more hyperbolic science fiction scenarios including the rise of a new continent of Afroatlantis and space aliens offering Americans profits in exchange for selling black people into space slavery.
While the scenarios are absurd, they’re there to illustrate Bell’s argument that the Constitution is nothing more than what benefits white people at any given time. This is the same argument that the godfather of critical race theory had repeatedly made throughout his career, contending, for example, that the ban on segregation was not a rejection of racism, only a ploy by white people to defeat the Soviet Union and Communism by showing that they weren’t racist.
(Likewise, Faces, along with a defense of Farrakhan and condemnation of Jews for opposing black antisemitism, portrays Jews as protesting against the plan to sell black people into slavery only because in the absence of blacks, “Jews could become the scapegoats”.)
Such racial conspiracy theories, ubiquitous in the work and thought of black nationalists and supremacists, who always begin and end with the premise of white evil, pervade Bell’s work.
"Faces At the Bottom of the Well” was a way to popularize and communicate this central idea at a level that even a child or a not particularly bright Harvard student, already nursing resentments, would be able to understand by depicting scenarios in which the white society and white people would cheerfully revamp the Constitution to bring back black slavery.
Thus near the end of the “Space Traders'' story, Bell has the Supreme Court unanimously rule that, “if inducted in accordance with a constitutionally approved conscription provision, blacks would have no issues of individual rights for review” and tells us that, “By 70 percent to 30 percent, American citizens voted to ratify the constitutional amendment that provided a legal basis for acceptance of the Space Traders’ offer”. Behind the SciFi is the message that the majority of Americans, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution would allow black people to be enslaved again and that therefore black people should not rely on whites or the Constitution.
The Constitution, according to Bell, is merely the whim of a white agenda that serves its purposes. To the extent that the law has outlawed segregation and slavery, it did so only because it temporarily served white purposes and the moment that it would serve white purposes to enslave black people again, it would be done within the Constitution.
That is the message of "Faces At the Bottom of the Well”: the book that influenced Jackson.
Does Jackson believe that the Supreme Court would rule that black people could be sold into slavery? Like everything about her record, we know we can’t expect an honest answer.
And yet her speech, which touches not only on the racist rants of Bell and his wife, but on the 1619 Project, introduces the idea that our founding documents are racially untrustworthy.
Praising the racial revisionist history of the 1619 Project, Jackson touts Nikole Hannah-Jones' "provocative thesis that the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it purported to be" and that only black civil rights activism made America "the free nation that the Framers initially touted."
Much like the 1619 Project, this description is rife with historical anachronisms and fundamental inaccuracies that is even less befitting a Supreme Court justice than a New York Times hack, but also implicitly echoes the critical race theory understanding that the civil rights struggle was not about upholding the Constitution, but overcoming it, that America's founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were racist and remain the enemy.
In the process of her lecture, Jackson invokes critical race theory, the pernicious concept of "white privilege", and intersectionality.
The radicalism oozes around the edges of Ketanji Brown Jackson's talk.
The Supreme Court nominee praises Gloria Richardson who, in Jackson's words, "took part in several protests that ended in violent clashes with white residents" and "indirectly challenged SNCC’s non-violent ideology." She quotes Richardson as saying, “[w]hen we were attacked at demonstrations, [we women] were the ones throwing stones back at the whites.”
Gloria Richardson was a wealthy leftist organizer with political connections during the Cambridge Riots who had contemptuously dismissed Martin Luther King and asserted, “We weren’t going to stop until we got it, and if violence occurred, then we would have to accept that.”
Black nationalists hail her because she’s seen as breaking the embargo on local nonviolence in protests. And Richardson had emphasized that to the extent to which she used nonviolence was as a "tactical device". To Jackson, most of the law seems to likewise be a tactical device.
And that’s the problem.
Absorbing the paranoid racism of the godfather of critical race theory during her formative years at Harvard makes for a bad judge and a worse justice. Bell’s approach to the Constitution, like that of black nationalists, was that it was a trick to lure black people into lowering their guard.
White people, he believed, could never be trusted and all that mattered was seizing power.
Any laws or documents made by white people would only serve them. Only black people could secure the rights of black people. Like the Nazis, the ultimate truths were race and power.
Everything else was a distraction.
If that is Ketanji Brown Jackson’s worldview, she cannot be expected to come out and say it. But the highest court in the land is the last place for racial paranoia and nationalism. The Supreme Court is charged with upholding the Constitution. A judge who does not believe in the Constitution, but believes in critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and white privilege is manifestly unfit to decide the fate of a nation and its hundreds of millions of people.
Derrick Bell and his hateful ideology believed that white racism was the only abiding truth.
There’s no room for that kind of thinking on the Supreme Court.
Amen.
Amen.
Is that her in the middle foto hugging the Mesiah?
today Mitch McConnell announced he would not support her nomination.But Mitt Romsey amd Murakowski apparemntly are still for her, enough for a confirmation vote.
Now we will have 3 women MArxists on SCOTUS
Obama hugging Bell.
At Harvard.
That is the message of "Faces At the Bottom of the Well”: the book that influenced Jackson.
“But that’s not all jobs - most jobs are mixes of IQ, emotional and social IQ, hard work, desire to achieve, decent values etc. etc. etc. Women’s IQ’s tend to be clustered around the mean... a new set of problems for some professions. Men can be low on social IQ...”
All that is true, and if people were allowed to be chosen for a job strictly on individual merit, there would be absolutely no problem with that.
But consider what would happen if that was the case, i.e. people would be chosen for a job and students would get graded based on their abilities.
Which group of people would end up with the most menial jobs?
Which group of students would perform most badly at school?
Would it be the group with the higher AVERAGE IQ or the other one.
Now if the members of each group were easily identifiable as belonging to one or the other group, what do you think would happen when the group that has the most menial jobs and does poorly at school becomes aware of that?
Do you think they might conclude there’s something wrong with the system? Might they ask, why is our group at the bottom rung of the ladder, especially since they’ve been told over and over that all races are the same?
And if all races are on the average the same, they might conclude that their bad lot in life must be due to the other group keeping them down. And do you think they might start rioting and asking for redress?
Meanwhile, many of the better performing group that have bought into the false assertion that “all races are the same”, might they not buy the argument that it must be their groups fault for the other group poor performance? And having thus admitted guilt, might they not agree that the other group must be given special considerations, privileges, and preferential treatment in all aspects of life, even reparations for past sins?
And if after all that, the poorly performing group still continues to do badly, and actually even worse, who does the guilt wracked member of the well performing group blame? Himself, of course. He just hasn’t done enough to fix all his past sins, so he doubles down on self loathing, and looks for any opportunity to grovel, ask for forgiveness and self flagellate. Guilt is an awful thing to carry around, and he will do anything to atone.
Is this not the scenario that we’re experiencing, have experienced, and will continue to experience?
Marxists and liberal ‘elites’ do their best to segment the population into racial grievance groups... but the whole ‘people of color’, latinx, etc crap is falling apart. It’s not how people think - and it’s backfiring.
Very few people with IQ’s of 90 want to be Bank Presidents...and that the grievance rub democrats/deep state bureaucrats can’t get past.
What I presented has nothing to do with Marxists, just human nature and its strong affinity with group identity.
What specific parts of what I said do you disagree with?
I wishe Obama had of hugged me. I would have had some of that radio active Pooty Poison for him.
What I find offensive is that these CRT bastards think they can conquer our country with such jingoistic simplistic, sophomoric, ideology , which originates at the intellectual level of a gnat. When compared to the writings of say, Abraham Lincoln, Samuael Admams or Martin Luther King Jr., they are lower than the level of comic book thinking.
It is Bell’s ideology whichi is less than a whim, it devalues ALL freedom, whether that ofd a Black Man or a White Man....a dostressing factor that most advocates of CRT like Jackson gloss over so very glibbly.I would line to sand Obama, Jackson and Bell on their heads physically and say....this is what the loss of freedom feels like. And you want to tale it away from everybody in our country?
Leave all three of the bastardly bitches suspended in their inversion until they each pass out.
Maybe then they might get it, but I doubt it.
I am offended by their kackamaimy.Why treat it like genuine ideology? My Irish Setter could come up with better and he would sell his mother for a cone of ice cream..
Most of what you're saying shows you've looked into this issue and thought out some interesting connections. I didn't mean to come across as hyper critical. The above is the part I'm having a problem with - and it's fairly minor. Unless there's an outside force constantly reinforcing racial identity political delusions that part fades. The opposite is also true which is why newspapers 'minders' (reporters paid by outside 'foundations' to do active reporting on old and new racial grievances - the pouring salt in wounds movement) are 'worth the money' they cost... same with forcing CRT on students despite the negative blow-back on teachers, schools, administrators and local politicians.
Tell me aquila48, how many times in your life have you compared yourself to others in your racial group compared to how many times you've compared yourself to others in your family or neighborhood or place of employment? That's my point.
“Tell me aquila48, how many times in your life have you compared yourself to others in your racial group compared to how many times you’ve compared yourself to others in your family or neighborhood or place of employment? That’s my point.”
I don’t do much personal comparison on an individual basis.
What I’m more aware of is how different, easily identified groups of people perform, on the AVERAGE and long term, in society, in terms of visible success.
What I see is blacks perform quite well, on the AVERAGE, in sports and music and entertaining in general, but do rather poorly in other aspects of life especially those that involve analytical thinking - which correlates strongly with IQ.
I keep emphasizing the word AVERAGE, because the average defines the distribution of the population (the bell curve), and it’s the average that has the most impact on a society. The rare Walter Williams, Clarence Thomases, Thomas Sowells, etc, although they have a positive impact, it’s the 50% that are below an IQ of 85 has a much greater (and mostly negative) societal impact.
You may ask, why look at people based on their race, why not look at each individual based on their merits? I offered the reason in my previous posting - people identify strongly with their race, and when blacks see their “brothers” occupying the bottom rung of the ladder year after year, you can’t blame them for asking why are they’re fellow brothers in such a dismal situation, especially when they’re told that all races are the same.
On top of that, they are easy prey to those you call marxists, and I call scab-pickers, and Nietzsche called them tarantulas. These are people who refuse to accept reality and the fact that people on the average don’t all perform the same is the greatest insult to their sense of justice, and they’ll go to the ends of the earth to “fix the problem” including righteously killing whoever gets in their way.
The blacks are the perfect target for them, even better than their traditional ones, the lower classes. It’s very easy to stoke up a sense of envy and anger in a group of people who believe they got the short hand of the stick.
Because of all this, it is my firm conviction that two groups of people whose members are easily identifiable as belonging to one or the other group, AND who have a significant difference in AVERAGE IQ, can never peacefully coexist together.
If you look around the world, do you see any exceptions?
It’s a very sad and tragic reality, but a reality nonetheless, and trying to sweep that reality under the rug has gotten us the racial dystopia we’re currently living. And it will only get worse.
Do you agree?
4 am.
Open up your heart and your mind to the work of Dr Derreck Bell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuBqdGVimS4
says obama
(The snowflake making the introduction to the video needs to volunteer for military action in Ukraine)
Honest to goodness, these bendover boys will be the end of America. HOW CAN PEOPLE VOTE FOR THESE IDIOTS. Are the voters clear bonkers?
Derreck Bell is a simpleton. And a fascist.Martin Luther King Jr. would ridicule him.
“I have a Dream” has become “ I have a scream!”
When you establish definitions of 'visible success' within the confines of YOUR social reality you win YOUR argument. Reminds me of the quirky human habit of comparing people in the world to each of our best traits. An artist will judge people based on their creativity - a chef on 'taste awareness', a politician on the ability to 'get along'...
There's also bell curves for life's tasks for the cities, states, countries and the world that require diverse talents and IQ's of all types.
Again, I'm not disagreeing with your numbers or research. And yes, we agree important realities are being ignore that cause social cracks and discomfort for our culture and many cultures the world over. But past that you and I come from very different perspectives and while we can agree on many facts we'll draw different conclusions. We see different realities that we give different weights to... So let's agree to disagree and be happy we're on the same site to every now and then we can compare life's notes.
List 5 major problems based on your analysis of average racial IQ differences. I know you’ve made some good points... let’s see how they stack up in each of our ‘different points of views’.
“List 5 major problems based on your analysis of average racial IQ differences. I know you’ve made some good points... let’s see how they stack up in each of our ‘different points of views’.”
1. Which group has the most welfare recipients relative to their population?
2.Which group commits the most crimes relative to their population?
3. Which group does the worst academically relative to their population
4. Which group has the highest dropout rate relative to their population.
5. Which group is constantly asking for more handouts and preferential treatment relative to their population?
Where the Marxists come in in this discussion is that they use the conditions of the blacks to advance their agenda. And what is their agenda? They are driven by missionary zeal to eradicate inequality as they see it. They desire that all people (except for themselves of course) have equal results since “we’re all equal”. And so they want to eradicate the existing system that in their view is the source of this awful inequality.
And they use the conditions of the blacks as their justifications for upending the status quo. The blacks are the perfect victim, partly because regardless of how much preferential treatment is given them they still don’t do too well generally speaking.
The blacks are a much better victim group than the old proletariat, because the proletariats were able to advance significantly in a capitalistic system. The class structure was not static, there was substantial mobility - poor became rich and rich became poor. With blacks the situation is more static. So there is a very strong symbiotic relationship between marxism and the plight of the blacks. It’s a match made in heaven... or hell.
Marxists use the plight of the blacks to guilt the rest of society into changing the “system” and thus advancing their agenda, and the blacks go along with that because the marxists deliver a lot of bennies to them.
Do you agree?
I feel like we’re in a ‘nature/nurture debate from years ago... I’m not denying your statistics - I’m debating the cultural milieu they arise out of...
We’ll talk again...
(Toxic incentives arising out of the Great Society ‘programs’ worked on people with 90 IQ regardless of race... but yes, the percentages were different. And that could easily be attributed to culture...)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.