Free Republic

One of the more common spins by the mainstream media about the now-famous Derrick Bell video is that the rally was for more diversity on the Harvard Law campus. This is wrong. In fact, Bell and Obama were demanding special treatment for Regina Austin, a radical black law professor with poor credentials—she lacked the usual Supreme Court clerkships or law-review appointments—necessary for the position. Bell and Obama demanded that Harvard violate its longstanding policy about not voting on tenure track positions to visiting professors.Don’t take my word for it. Take Derrick Bell’s. He granted that Austin lacked the proper credentials...

Professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. Believes the black community should accommodate criminal behavior and find “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.”.Her approach to teaching law rests on her belief that “law is useful as a supplement to activism.”.   A professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, Regina Austin is a feminist, an environmentalist activist, and a proponent of critical race theory, a scholarly tradition that considers white racism a permanent aspect of American life and thus advocates compensatory, race-based preferences for blacks in such realms as employment and higher...

Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed discovered this little gem of a video, in which then-law student Barack Obama spoke at a protest in favor of Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell. Kaczynski explains what the protest was all about. Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of "critical race theory," which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard's denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school's professors were black and only...