Derrick Bell on Class and Class-based Discrimination Against Whites
I often encounter the following two charges against critical race theorists. First, CRTers don’t talk about class. Second, CRTers don’t discuss discriminatory practices whites suffer. Both charges are false.
Derrick Bell, CRT’s founding father, regularly wrote about class and class-based discrimination against whites. Both themes surface in his groundbreaking essays “Serving Two Masters” (1976) and “Racial Remediation” (1976). They also repeatedly appear in his famous book duo And We are Not Saved (1987) and Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992). And Bell’s final book Silent Covenants (2004) treats these phenomena, too.
In all the above cases, Bell engages historians including Winthrop Jordan, Edmund Morgan, and C. Vann Woodward to demonstrate that the majority of poor and working-class whites in the U.S. have consistently accepted and endorsed labor and education exploitation that harm them to maintain visions and practices of white solidarity that principally benefit elite, wealthy whites. But in one of his books, Confronting Authority (1994), Bell offers a sustained reflection on this historic trend that draws on his experiences as a law professor. I quote Bell at length (see pages 85-86), and let him have the last word.
It has always astounded me—perhaps more than it should—that white people willing to accept so much unfairness in admissions and job programs inevitably and vehemently draw the line when that unfairness seems to derive from racial or gender preference. For all of the litigation and self-righteous rhetoric that stems from opposition to programs that favor women and minorities, I have not heard of white protests against the widespread policies that favor people on the basis of wealth or social status. Where are the lawsuits challenging preferences either for alumnae or geographic region in college admissions, or against graduate school criteria that favor graduates of elite and expensive undergraduate schools? Even though the children of Harvard alumnae can point to no history of slavery or other class-based discrimination, no one questions their entitlement to special treatment in Harvard admissions.
Some years ago, I spent a day lecturing at Pace University Law School in Westchester County. In speaking to various classes and in the question and answer period following a school-wide lecture, I noted a quite strong opposition to affirmative action programs. One articulate white student acknowledged the discrimination blacks had suffered in the past. “Now, though, everyone must make it on merit. That is the American way.” In response, I suggested to him that while he seemed quite able, as able as the students I had taught at Harvard and met at Yale and Columbia Law Schools, when he graduated from Pace he would have a hard time competing at large corporate law firms, whose hiring partners prefer to hire lawyers whose parents had been able to send them to Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. “What,” I asked him, “do you have to say about that?” He paused, eyes glazed. Obviously, he was so focused on what he called “reverse discrimination” that he had not thought about the possibility of his being passed by for jobs because he had not come from an upper-class background.
“That’s the breaks,” he said finally. I looked at him in wonder. “In other words,” I said, “you will be deeply suspicious if any black—no matter how able—gets a job you want, but you will step aside and let upper-class whites no smarter than you take jobs you want to advance your career and support your family?” “Well,” he said finally, trying to muster a degree of dignity, “one of these days, I hope to be able to send my kids to Harvard and Yale.” I shook my head. Racism has been devastating to blacks, but it has also done serious harm to a great many whites.
