In 1994, Barack Obama taught a course at the University of Chicago Law School entitled, “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” The reading list and syllabus for that class were made available by the New York Times in 2008, though there seems to have been little analysis of its content by Jodi Kantor, the Times’s Obama correspondent.
Obama routinely assigned works by Bell as required reading, including Bell’s racialist interpretations of seminal civil rights laws and cases. No other scholar’s work appears as often in the syllabus as Bell’s does.
Obama relied particularly heavily upon Bell’s major work, Race, Racism, and American Law (1973). Now in its sixth edition, the book lays out Bell’s Critical Race Theory, which is based on the Alinskyite presumption that all of law is a construct–not of justice, but of power exercised by whites against blacks.
(Obama appears to be diagramming just such a presumption in a famous photo from his campaign that ran in The Times and accompanied a piece written by Kantor on Obama’s stint as a law lecturer. The title of the diagram, “relationships built on self-interest,” links corporations, banks, and utilities, as part of a “power analysis.”)
Perhaps most interesting was Obama’s decision to include and to require the introduction to Bell’s controversial 1992 book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, which relied on manufactured stories (or, as Bell called them, “allegories” or “fables”) meant to portray the allegedly structural racism of American society.
In a September 24, 1992 interview with C-Span’s Brian Lamb, Lamb quoted this paragraph from Bell’s book and asked Bell for comment.
Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary peaks of progress, short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance. (p. 12, italics in original)
“That, if I had to put down my whole thirty five years working in this [field] is [my view] reflected… If you read nothing else, I think that reflects my experience,” Bell told Lamb.
That is what Obama wanted his fellow students at Harvard, and the students he taught at Chicago, to understand–and believe.
Contrary to media spin, Obama did not encounter radical racialist professor Derrick Bell in a youthful flirtation with radicalism.
Obama befriended Bell as an adult, and he used Bell’s work to indoctrinate his own students about race and the law.
Obama sure does love those radicals. Robert Bork is on the readin – er, indoctrination list.
Even the Latebreitbart gang doesn’t have what I have. I’ve time-stamped Obama’s blinks in his State of the Union address, and found that he repeats “Bell will lead you to freedom from whitey” over and over in Morse code. He also blinks pi to 105 decimal places, but I think that was just random.
woh. wow!
Applause.
I’m indifferent on this issue, so can someone please explain to me what the big deal is here?
Is it: a) that we should be concerned that someone who would take to a “radical” mentor like Bell would then rule with a similar philosophy as leader of the free world?
or
b) that an African-American took to heart what this guy was saying and set out to change that ‘reality’…and this is new and scary for our country.
If the answer is (a), I would like someone to explain how this is in any way different than how Rick Santorum would wield power through his slightly askew view of the world (as seen through his God’s eyes)?
Honestly, I’d rather have the black dude with a chip on his shoulder versus the man who wants to lead according to what his “God” instructs him to do.
For a country of 300,000,000+ plus people, these are two of the most qualified guys to lead?
Fuck me.
From an outsider (non-American) looking in (living in the US), from what I can gather it is part A and part C.
C) Rick Santorum or any other Republican candidate will have their beliefs picked apart ad-nauseam by the media and scrutinized to the nth degree in a very public fashion and as a result will have to publicly explain any and all discrepancies. But this issue was ignored by the media in the last election and, regardless of whether it leads anywhere or not, needs to be addressed and explained.
Exactly, it’s about the scrutiny of the ideology, not the ideology itself.
Fact is, Obama’s ideology is so hard left, it cannot bear scrutiny. People may think Santorum is a bit too hard core, but everyone knows hard core Christians… they are threatening only to the very thin statist element of the left… everyone who is sane knows they have no power to “impose” their personal beliefs thanks to the baleful check of the left leaning media.
If anything, they can only hope to escape ridicule. Obama, on the other hand, receives cover for his agenda, rather than scrutiny.
See the diff?
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Jake,
You are not in the echo chamber out here. Just repeating bullshit over and over again won’t make it come true. “hard left politics.” Demonstrate that. Which bills, precisely, are you talking about? Obama-Romney care with no public option?
And as for the lunatic right being powerless, they’ve already passed so much legislation at the state level since getting elected that they’re getting recalled. And your fantasy that they’re “not statist” bears scrutiny. You mean, like GWB’s two wars are not statist?
Really? What is it precisely that you smoke? Because that is some strong shit and I’m sending my black helicopters to come and confiscate it from you.
Oh, duh, I forgot. You’re the one who smokes ideology, crack-cocaine pure and unadulturated by anything but the right’s echo chamber of complete and total garbage, hate and, to be frank, demonstrably treasonous and unpatriotic vituperation.
It has occurred to me recently that you and the three stooges around here speak from the position of what used to be called a fifth column. Indeed, it often seems like you’re angling for a second civil war because you never got over the first one.
Good day to you sir.
Don’t mock men with the word “Sir” coward. Less you lose your mandible.
Point to which bill. Which law.
YOU point to a law or reg.!
Gentlemen remember better. We cite the Constitution. The “laws” which you assert, are often ultra vires and undelegable.
This is the debate about which you remain a boy. Doting in some cafe shop, with a target on you… .
Which preamble?
We will simply take back the country. This time. There will be indictments. Charges are in the midst.
Washington’s on notice.
America will rise again.
I don’t see the big deal, either, so I can’t directly answer your question.
The reason I don’t see the big deal is because Obama has not ruled, as your option (a) puts it, “with a similar philosophy” to that of Bell (as described by critics). Ditto for Ayers, Wright, Alinsky, Indonesian schoolteachers, and whomever else supposedly has had a hand in turning Obama into some sort of supervillan.
With more than 3 years of his administration to judge, we’ve had ample opportunity to determine what we do and don’t like about his policies and actions.
I consider those 3 years to be of high value to me in forming an opinion about Obama as President. In contrast, snippets of info about his life 10, 15, 20, or even 40 years ago (yes, stuff that old is still being dug up and discussed currently) are of low value to me – especially when I see no evidence that they shape his current performance and policies.
Ottnot, there are many examples of Bell’s philosophy put into action by Obama. First is when Holder dropped the Black Panther lawsuit for voter intimidation and the second is the administration’s blocking of S.C.’s voter i.d. law. There are many others. Dismantling systemic white oppression (according to Bell) means dismantling most of what drives American commerce. Obama obviously supports this dismantling with his administration becoming part and parcel of the Occupy Anti-Capitalism movement. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that Bell would have viewed capitalism as an inherently racist structure.
Furthermore, what many are concerned about is a second term where it is widely believed Obama will attempt to enact his most radical beliefs.
Not to mention the RADICALS he places in prominent bureaucratic czar and cabinet positions that guide executive policy: Van Jones, John Holdren, Valerie Jarrett… Obama does not scare me as much as the people appoints to carry out and execute the laws congress writes.
In the New Black Panther Party case:
–the Bush administration decided not to pursue a criminal case
–the Obama administration obtained a civil injunction against the person who carried a billy club at the polling station
–the Obama administration did not pursue action against the second person at the station, as they agreed with the local police who responded that he could stay and was not intimidating voters
–the case against the party itself was dropped mostly because the NBPP, unpleasant as they are, didn’t appear to take any action as an organization. There were just 2 people at the one voting station.
The South Carolina voter ID law was found to have a disproportionately higher impact on minorities than on non-minority voters – not a surprising finding when the most common ID (driver’s license) is one that people are less likely to get if they can’t afford a car.
Anything about dismantling the drivers of American commerce veers far into paranoid delusion, in my opinion.
Explain Valerie Jarret, his EPA moves to do an end-around on Congress w. regard to carbon policy, Obamacare and its attendant strictures, not the least of those forcing people of conscience to betray their religious beliefs in obeisance to the State. These are just a few of the many undemocratic power grabs more akin to a junta leader’s tactics than that of one third of the checked and balanced government.
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Ott. The more you write, the more I recognize the kind of bureaucrat that one day finds himself cut off from his inner circle. The kind that ultimately commit suicide. Before this occurs. Do anyone who has humored your inane existence a favor, pick up some life insurance.
this latest swift-boat attempt is laughable .. won’t swing a single vote
yeah, he ‘forced’ them – at gunpoint
Jeice. Grab a boal of concrete oatmeal this morning. Fewl.
its funny how facts r misinterpered. but the out come of events stay the same..lol , obama is just a puppet. whos pullin the strings?
Same as its been in this country for 90+ years– l’Internationale.
It’s all about the control.
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Word to the Spooks — “oh yeah, well X is a statist too” is not an excuse for your Statist’s profligacies, in my book.
As for the litany of legislation that’s been rolled down the pike since the Pelosi-Reid investiture in 2006, the list runneth over. Some particularly egregious highlights include the $900 bn stimulus package that did nothing but pay off various gov’t functionaries and bureaucracies and created zero jobs, the hideous Statis FEDERAL Obamacare, whose unaffordable horrors have already visited upon us enough “waivers” to various Democrat cronies to make the whole exercise laughable, and–last but not least– the migraine inducing Dodd-Frank Financial “Reform” Bill, which not only binds our financial system so tight that only the largest of behemoth cronies/slaves of the Democrat Machine will survive its strictures, but also creates YET ANOTHER bullshit federal bureacucracy that will oversee the benighted “financial consumer” — aka, “make yet more avenues for corruption and power-ceding in the obese Executive Branch bureaucracy.”
You see Spooks, my aim is to move AWAY from more Chavista fascist government, not whine about how “this guy was a fascist too” and then proceed to pull the lever for the guy whose making it exponentially worse.
Shrugging your shoulders and accepting government decay from the inside is NOT the answer.
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