This conversation originally appeared in What Matters Most: Conversations on the Art of Living by Anthony Morgan (ed.) (Agenda Publishing, 2023)
For Derrick Bell, the influential legal scholar and activist, we must acknowledge both that anti-Black racism in America is permanent, and that we all have a moral obligation to resist it. This paradoxical formulation lies at the heart of his influential and controversial thesis of “racial realism”. This conversation, which took place in November 2021, looks at Bell’s thesis in the context of a supposedly post-racial America heralded by the election of Barack Obama as president. Critically engaging with the racial progress narrative, Timothy Golden argues that racism has in fact worsened since Obama’s presidency, simmering away until unleashed by the Trump administration. As Golden concludes, the letter of the law may have changed in some domains, but there have not been corresponding changes to the hearts and minds of people.
Darren Chetty (DC): Who was Derrick Bell and what did he mean by “racial realism”?
Timothy Golden (TG): Derrick Bell was a legal scholar, activist and public intellectual who lived from 1930 to 2011. The expanse of Bell’s oeuvre is truly impressive, worthy of extensive scholarly treatment in law, philosophy, social and political theory, and theology. In the current political climate, Bell is probably best known for being one of the originators of critical race theory. He advanced a trenchant critique of liberalism, seeing it as a handmaiden in maintaining the structural and material conditions of white supremacy, such that white supremacy is made “legal” through abstract notions of “rights” removed from the concrete political realities of Black life in America.
Turning to his thesis of “racial realism”, it can be summed up as follows: on the one hand, anti-Black racism in America is permanent, but, on the other hand, we all have a moral obligation to resist it. This is Bell’s most controversial thesis – both during his lifetime and beyond. Bell’s claim about the permanence of American anti-Black racism is an inductive, empirical claim. To substantiate it, Bell commits to a careful study of socio-economic data that show racism flourishing in ways that disadvantage Black people not only in legal institutions but also in education, healthcare, economics, and so on. For Bell, American anti-Black racism has, at its core, a remarkable resiliency and adaptability that enables it to conceal itself while flourishing beneath the surface. For Bell, the abstractions of American constitutional jurisprudence are especially complicit here, as they reinforce notions of colour-blind liberalism that ignore history in the interest of “getting beyond” racism, which has yet to happen.
It is important to understand that Bell was working within a much broader tradition of Black intellectual history in the United States. In fact, in the final revisions that he made to his 1970 magnum opus, Race, Racism and American Law, he credits many of his insights about the permanence of racism to the work of African American political theorist Ralph Bunche who had critiqued the idea that the legal system would be a way for African Americans to gain liberation from the legacy of slavery. Bunche argued that the Supreme Court engaged in such a level of abstraction that it completely ignored the concrete realities of Black life, upholding the denial of Black suffrage, not based on the concrete realities of Black life, but based on abstract legal reasoning that neglected and de-historicized the material and social conditions of Black people. So, Bell is inheriting this intellectual tradition (that in fact goes all the way back to the work of Martin Delany in the nineteenth century), and it is from this intellectual heritage, as well as his own scrupulous interrogation of contemporary available data, that he arrives at the first part of his thesis: American anti-Black racism is permanent, and American law and legal institutions ultimately perpetuate racism rather than eradicate it.
The second part of the thesis is that despite racism’s permanence, we still have a moral obligation to fight against it. This is what left a lot of people scratching their heads! In one interview, Bell likened this approach to that of an alcoholic who is trying to maintain sobriety. The alcoholic, Bell points out, will always have to say that they will always be an alcoholic because if they did not acknowledge this fact, the likelihood of a relapse increases. Similarly, we will always have to say that America will be racist. And in making that claim, we are, in some sense, channelling a spirit of resistance that comes to us from myriad ordinary Black people who exhibited extraordinary fortitude. One such person whom Bell points to in his work was a poor Black woman from Mississippi named Biona McDonald. When Bell asked her where she got her energy to continue to resist, her reply was, “Derrick, I can’t speak for the others, but as for me, I am an old woman. I lives to harass white folks”. For Bell, she embodied a spirit of resistance to racism against overwhelming odds. And this sense of resistance is where the victory lies. Racism has won the battle the day that we decide to give up the struggle against it.
If we believe that racism is a temporary phenomenon, one that can somehow be overcome, there is a real risk that we rush to come up with theories and solutions to help solve a problem that we have failed to engage.
DC: In his famous essay “Racial Realism”, Bell writes, “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”. He then goes on to say, “We must acknowledge it and move on to adopt policies based on what I call: ‘Racial Realism.’ This mind-set or philosophy requires us to acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status. That acknowledgement enables us to avoid despair, and frees us to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph”. As I read this, the first question that comes to mind is: how does this view enable us to avoid despair?
TG: Unsurprisingly, Bell was often asked this question! We have already touched upon one of the answers Bell gave in comparing this situation to that of the alcoholic. If we believe that racism is a temporary phenomenon, one that can somehow be overcome, there is a real risk that we rush to come up with theories and solutions to help solve a problem that we have failed to engage. Consider the kind of engagement required by white people (especially in the United States) in this context: to engage racism in all of its complexity is to come to grips with the role that they have played in maintaining white supremacy. And most of them are not prepared for that intense level of self-examination. For Bell, to say that racism is temporary is really just a way to avoid responsibility. If we think that one day it is going to all be over, then we can just keep kicking the can down the road, whereas, if we embrace it and acknowledge its permanence, then, much like the alcoholic, we have to remain vigilant against it, we cannot rest. In many ways, I am echoing the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who speaks of what he calls “insomnia” – a condition characterized by an inability to rest, an incessant vigilance, a complete disruption of one’s economy of enjoyment. But most white people have become so accustomed to this economy of enjoyment that the thought of sacrificing it for the greater good of living in a less racist world that demands a relinquishment of their racial privilege is just too much.
But the other way that I’d like to touch on now is grounded in an ongoing commitment to the struggle for freedom. I find the play Two Trains Running by August Wilson instructive here. In that play, there is a character named Hambone. Hambone is promised a ham if he paints a fence for a white butcher shop owner. Hambone then diligently paints the fence, but when he demands his ham after he had fulfilled his end of the bargain, the butcher shop owner offers him a chicken instead. Hambone has a mental disability, and he can only say two things: “I want my ham” and “He gonna give me my ham”. That is all he says. I have always thought that August Wilson wrote Hambone into the script to be a microcosm of the African American experience, which is to be on the receiving end of a broken promise. To be promised the ham of freedom, but to be given the chicken of despair (so to speak). Hambone becomes a hero in the story, because although he dies without ever getting his ham, his courage and persistence in demanding his ham every day for nearly a decade is where his real heroism lies. I call for – and I believe Bell does too – a Hambone-like commitment in the struggle for freedom in America, because, like Bell, I submit that the day we cease to struggle is the day we lose the battle. Hambone never stopped struggling, and neither should we. The resonance with the Judeo-Christian tradition is significant here, as Hambone is a literary representation, along with the widow in Jesus’ parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1–8), of a spirit of importunity that Bell views as indispensable in the Black struggle for justice in America.
From the seemingly endless police killings of unarmed Black men and women during the Obama presidency and their continuation during the Trump administration, to the white backlash against critical race theory, Black Americans are painfully reminded that racism has worsened since Obama’s presidency, not improved.
DC: I thought we could now turn to Bell’s theory of “interest convergence”. I take this idea to mean something like: what we take to be racial progress for African Americans would not have actually happened were it not for the fact that there are coexisting interests for white people at the heart of the changes that are made. You have written about how the election of Barack Obama was an example of interest convergence. You note that he was elected in the fallout from the 2008 financial crash, and that Obama was considered more competent than his opponents to handle the financial crisis facing the United States. As you write (echoing Langston Hughes), “[T]he financial interests of upper-class and upper-middle-class whites coincidentally converged with the hopes and dreams of African Americans – hopes and dreams that were longstanding because they were long deferred”. My question is simply: what is the problem with interest convergence? The way it is presented is that what we may have thought of as progress is in fact simply interest convergence. But I am wondering whether it can be seen as good diplomacy, even as good activist strategy, to find a way of framing a gain to oneself or one’s own group as helpful to those with whom you are negotiating?
TG: In line with what you have just said, I don’t think that interest convergence is necessarily a bad thing. But that is not the sort of thing that Derrick Bell is talking about here. Bell is talking about a very specific phenomenon in which whites tend to set the agenda in the United States. And if it happens to be the case that the hopes and dreams of Black people coincide with what white people are interested in addressing in that historical moment, then we get what many will naively call “racial progress”. But the moment that it is no longer a priority for white people, they can cease putting their efforts behind this sort of initiative. This is why Bell refers to the emblems of so-called racial progress as mere racial “symbols”, and why the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 is such a good example of Bell’s theory of interest convergence: the moral wrongness of racism took a backseat to the financial interests of upper-class and upper-middle-class whites, and we elected the first Black president while pushing the false narrative that his election signalled the beginning of a “post-racial” America. And yet nothing could be further from the truth. Far from ending American anti-Black racism, Obama’s election seemed to embolden it. From the seemingly endless police killings of unarmed Black men and women during the Obama presidency and their continuation during the Trump administration, to the white backlash against critical race theory, Black Americans are painfully reminded that racism has worsened since Obama’s presidency, not improved. Obama’s election, then, is a mere racial symbol resulting from interest convergence: it looks good from afar but ultimately rings hollow.
We could take other examples such as President Biden’s declaration about Juneteenth. He declares Juneteenth a federal holiday and African Americans are pleased with that. But this is nothing but a racial symbol. Why? Because African Americans still don’t have comprehensive legislation on police reform; because African Americans’ right to vote, which has only been protected in federal law for 48 years in American history, is still vulnerable. Similarly, in 1983 when Ronald Reagan signed Martin Luther King Jr Day into law, he was at the same time espousing crippling criminal justice policies that have resulted in the phenomenon that legal scholar Michelle Alexander has referred to as “mass incarceration”. Would you rather have a federal holiday or would you rather have federal legal protection of your most basic civil and constitutional rights? This is the kind of thing that Bell is talking about. He is targeting a very specific and devious kind of approach that whites use to placate Blacks in the United States when it comes to the idea of racial progress.
The letter of the law may have changed in some domains, but there have not been corresponding changes to the hearts and minds of people. And because of this, any perceived forms of racial progress are ephemeral at best.
DC: What you say takes me back to the inscription at the front of Faces at the Bottom of the Well where Derrick Bell writes that “only by working together is escape possible”. And yet he talks about how the poorest whites look down into the well at Black people. Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch mesmerized. They are prepared to condemn themselves simply in order to retain the self-esteem they gain by gazing down. Why have attempts for Black and white working-class interests to converge been so unsuccessful in the United States (and beyond the United States, of course)? Why is it that the working-class white American is satisfied with what W. E. B. Du Bois termed the “psychological wages of whiteness”, rather than fair wages and good living conditions for all working-class people?
TG: What has tended to happen in recent American history is very similar to what you see happening today. In the wake of slavery, for example, there was an attempt to unify the interests of poor whites with those of poor Blacks. But wealthy slave owners convinced poor whites that, as you put it, the psychological wages of whiteness were worth more than any allegiance that they could ever hope to have with Black people. And I think that has become a political playbook, so to speak. In the case of President Trump, you have a wealthy white person who has convinced many poor whites, with whom he has very little in common, that any sort of solidarity or allegiance with Black people is somehow degrading or even outright evil. The consequence is that you have poor whites calling for the end of critical race theory, and so on. Wealthy whites have taken a page out of the post-reconstruction playbook and you see it play out with a terrifying accuracy today. Keeping Blacks and whites apart is a formula that wealthy whites use to maintain social and economic control. Racism has now gotten so deep that you have poor whites who would never imagine having any sort of alliance with Black people. And the consequences of this are playing out socially, politically, legally and economically. Obviously, chattel slavery has come to an end and there have been changes to American law that have prevented conditions like slavery. The letter of the law may have changed in some domains, but there have not been corresponding changes to the hearts and minds of people. And because of this, any perceived forms of racial progress are ephemeral at best.
Timothy Golden is Professor of Philosophy at Walla Walla University, Washington, USA. His areas of scholarly research include African American philosophy and critical race theory.
Darren Chetty is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip hop culture.
Further resources:
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010.
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Derrick Bell, “Racial realism”. Connecticut Law Review 24(2) (1992): 363–79.
“Tommy Curry and the real critical race theory”. The Philosopher and the News podcast, 15 June 2021. https://newsphilosopher.buzzsprout.com/1577503/8702397.
Timothy Golden (ed.), Racism and Resistance: Essays on Derrick Bell’s Racial Realism. New York: SUNY Press, 2022.
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