Today I will summarize Part IV of Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023). By now you have no doubt heard of Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. They’ve been around a long time, since the 1980s in fact, but they burst onto the national consciousness in the summer of 2020 with the George Floyd protests and riots. In Part IV, Rufo tells the story of the origin of CRT and DEI in the thought of Derrick Bell (1930-2011).

Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism

After a brilliant career as a civil rights attorney working to make the racial equality promised in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a reality in the lives of black people, he grew pessimistic about achieving that goal. By the late 1960s, Bell had concluded that whatever the law said, white people would never accept black people as their equals. They would always find a way to keep them down. In 1969, Derrick Bell became the first black Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. And in 1973, he published a huge (1,000 pages) casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law. In this book Bell adumbrated what later came to be known as Critical Race Theory. Bell interpreted all the “advances” in civil rights—Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act (1964), and all the rest—as cynical moves designed to preserve white supremacy in different historical circumstances. White racism is built into the system.

“I Live to Harass White Folks”: The Politics of Eternal Resentment

Bell did not write in the academic style typical of a Harvard Law professor. Instead, he wrote fiction. Beginning with his 1983 foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s Supreme Court Issue, Bell wrote a series of allegories dramatizing ways in which white people always thwart black progress: “The Chronicle of the Celestial Curia,” “The Chronicle of the DeVine Gift,” “The Chronicle of the Amber Cloud,” and “The Chronicle of the Slave Scrolls.” These stories and others were published in two books, Faces at the Bottom of the Well and And We Are Not Saved. These stories explore white perversity in all its manifestations. His most famous story is “The Space Traders.” In the year 2000, space aliens come to earth and offer the American people advanced technology and medical science in exchange for all black people, whom they wished to take to their home planet. After some debate, American lawmakers decided to accept the space traders’ offer contingent on the outcome of a popular referendum. The legislators endorsed a “yes” vote on the referendum in the following words:

The Framers intended America to be a white country…After more than a hundred and thirty-seven years of good-faith efforts to build a healthy, stable interracial nation, we have concluded—as the Framers did in the beginning—that our survival today requires that we sacrifice the rights of blacks in order to protect and further the interest of whites. The Framers’ example must be our guide. Patriotism, and not pity, must govern our decision. We should ratify the amendment and accept the Space Traders’ proposition” (Quoted in Rufo, p. 225).

The referendum passed 70% to 30%. Black people, men, women, children, and babes in arms, were then herded at gun point, anguished and weeping, into alien spaceships.

Bell’s Harvard Law School career came to an end after he engaged in a two-year strike designed to pressure Harvard into hiring a black woman, specifically visiting professor Regina Austin, a radical critical race theorist who castigated white people in print and in front of her white students and celebrated the “Black Bitch.” After a two-year campaign of intimidation and name calling, Harvard fired Bell based on its policy that a professor could not take more than two years of unpaid leave.

The Rise of Critical Race Theory

During his career as a law professor Derrick Bell gathered about him many likeminded students. In 1989, one of his students Kimberlé Crenshaw organized a conference to address the question of what to do in view of the pervasive and permanent racism of America. Looking back a decade later, Crenshaw summarized the gist of the conference in these words: “We settled on what seemed to be the most telling marker for this particular subject. We would signify the specific political and intellectual marker for this project through [the term] “critical,” and the substantive focus through [the term] “race,” and the desire to develop a coherent account of race and law through the term “theory” (Quoted in Rufo, p. 232). Thus, Critical Race Theory was born. The definitive documents of CRT were published in two 1995 books: Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge and Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement.

As documented in these writings, CRT combines Derrick Bell’s cynicism and pessimism, post-modernism’s reduction of truth claims to power moves, and neo-Marxism’s distinction between oppressor and oppressed viewed through Crenshaw’s prism of intersectionality. Rufo outlines CRT’s strategy under three headings. (1) It adopts the post-modern dismissal of truth as a mask disguising the quest for power. This assertion allows CRT activists to dismiss any “rational” argument against their agenda and to employ any argument, narrative, or label that advances their goal, that is acquiring power for themselves. The black experience is the truth. Truth is whatever advances black people. (2) Kimberlé Crenshaw operationalized the concept of intersectionality for CRT. Rather than a simple dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed, she proposed a multilayered hierarchy of oppression. The white male reigns at the top and the black female lies at the bottom of the scale. Being the most marginalized, the black female possesses the most truth about the system of oppression. According to Crenshaw, all oppressed people—black women, homosexuals, the disabled, etc.—should join forces to push back against the quintessential oppressor, the white male. (3) CRT theorists incorporated the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of “cultural hegemony” and the “war of position.” With the guidance of these concepts, CRT activists set about the task, not of destroying American institutions by means of street violence, but of achieving power within those institutions, the university being the first target.

DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order

Critical Race Theorists needed to translate their ideology into a practical program and an effective rhetoric for acquiring power within American institutions. The triad of diversity, equity, and inclusion served this purpose brilliantly. The call for diversity could be mistaken for a call to make the institutions “look like America.” In fact, however, diversity calls for the inversion of the intersectional hierarchy of oppression. Marginalized identities and their interests are moved from the periphery to the center and dominate the institution. As Derrick Bell said, “The goals of diversity will not be served by persons who look black and think white” (Confronting Authority, 1994, quoted in Rufo, p. 253). Diversity in the CRT universe, then, means almost the opposite of what first comes to mind when you hear the word “diverse.” The word equity could easily be taken as a synonym for equality. In the traditional American understanding, “equality” applies to individuals and concerns individual negative rights. In the CRT world equity applies to groups, asserts positive rights, and aims at equality of outcomes. At first, it might seem that “inclusion” is another way of saying “diversity.” However, inclusion focuses on making those previously felt excluded feel fully accepted and comfortable. The mandate for inclusion lies at the root of all hate speech codes that exclude racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic expressions. It is the origin of sensitivities to “microaggressions,” and “unconscious bias;” it is the mother of cancel culture, (p. 254). In other words, almost all limits on free speech on college campuses, government agencies, and corporate cultures find their justification in the mandate for inclusion.

Rufo asks us to consider what it would take to make DEI truly effective in American culture. DEI theorists don’t leave us wondering how these goals are to be achieved. Derrick Bell’s disciples Cheryl Harris, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw lay out a roadmap. (1) The notion of private property must be abolished so that the government can redistribute wealth from white to black people. (2) The Constitutional system of individual rights must be replaced with group rights and entitlements. (3) The First Amendment must be reinterpreted to outlaw speech that harms black and other marginalized people. As Rufo points out, instituting these changes would constitute nothing short of a regime change. Ibram Kendi, for example, proposed an anti-racist constitutional amendment establishing a Department of Anti-Racism with authority to regulate every aspect of American life. This Department would answer to no one—not congress, not the executive branch, and not the judicial branch. To serve the cause of anti-racism, CRT theorists would “limit, curtail, or abolish, the rights to property, equal protection, due process, federalism, speech, and the separation of powers” (p. 266). DEI spells the DEATH of the American constitutional order.

Next Time: We will review Rufo’s recommendations for how a counter-revolutionary movement might push back and replace the now entrenched New Left.