THE DERRICK BELL READER edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2005)
The late Derrick Bell, pioneer of critical race theory, was of two minds about whites and racism in the USA.
He frequently wrote about how white racial prejudice hurts whites as well as blacks, and how whites have actually benefited from advances in civil rights, but that, despite these facts, racism is so embedded in the psychology of white people that we will never be able to see this.
At other times, and at least once in the same article, he wrote that the reason racism will never disappear is that white people benefit from racism.
Which is it? In his terms, if the first is true, there is a possibility, however dim, of waking up white people to our self-interest so that we join forces with black people for justice.
If the second is true, there is little hope for African-Americans. Demographic trends show black people remaining in the minority in the USA, and history shows white people can stay in the majority by expanding the definition of white.
The answer depends on how you look at it. If there had never been plantation slavery, never been lynch law, never been a black underclass, all of us Americans, white and black, would be better off.
On the other hand, if all Americans had been white, but we still had plantation slavery, lynch law and an economic underclass, then white people would have taken the places historically filled by blacks.
Prior to our Civil War, many writers reported on how a slave economy hurt white people. They contrasted conditions on opposite sides of the Ohio River. On the Ohio side, they could see well-built farmhouses and barns, fields full of grain, thriving small towns and businesses, all the product of enterprising white people.
On the Kentucky side, just opposite, visitors saw whites living in poverty and decay, ramshackle buildings, poorly-fed children. This was the result of the inability of white workers to compete with slave labor, and the belief that physical labor was degrading and only black people should do it.
The heritage of slavery to this day affects white people as well as black people. The poorest white people in the USA are the ones living in the areas where slave labor was most predominant.
Derrick Bell argued that just as slavery and racism held back the South in comparison to the rest of the USA, so the heritage of slavery and racism holds back the USA in relation to the rest of the Western world. The USA is the Mississippi of the OECD nations.
In his essay, “Wanted: a White Leader Able to Free Whites of Racism” (2000), reprinted in The Derrick Bell Reader, Bell remarked on how the USA lags behind less affluent countries in terms of health care, housing, child care and care of the aged, and on how the USA refuses to abolish the death penalty or improve prison conditions.
The reason, he wrote, is that white people, consciously or unconsciously, are convinced that efforts to promote the common good will help black people at our expense. So we cut off our noses to spite our faces.
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