African-Americans have struggled in post-Civil War America to create an equal-level playing field for themselves. Just because Barack Obama is President does not mean that racism has vanished. Systematic disparities between African Americans, other minorities and White-Americans still exists in the areas of education, employment, law, and politics.
Black intellectuals have sought to use their rationality and platform to correct these wrongs. Historically speaking many minority groups have relied on their public intellectuals to beat the oppressors in their own game, namely in the marketplace of ideas and give them recognition, and justice. The Dalits of India rallied around Dr. Ambedkar and the Palestinians around Edward Said.
The attacks on two Black intellectuals come to mind in recent times. The first is Charles Ogletree and the second is the late Derrick Bell. These attacks should not simply be viewed as defamation against these two men. The larger macroscopic picture is that the Right is trying desperately to link President Obama to individuals whom they wish to paint as black supremacists and anti-white and through guilt-by-association imply that Obama is as well since, both Ogletree and Bell knew Obama from first-hand experience.
I will attempt to prove that neither Ogletree nor Bell are Black Supremacists or anti-white. That is simply a smear. They may be considered Anti-White Supremacists.
But first let me provide some background and context from Alternet (the article is dated March 9, 2012):
In July 2010, Glenn Beck devoted a segment to Charles Ogletree, a black tenured Harvard professor whose many pupils included Barack Obama. In the segment, Beck quoted Shamir Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party, who said that sometimes you have to “kill crackers.” Beck suggested that Ogletree, and by extension Obama, supported these views.
Any suggestion that killing someone because of their race, or even disliking them solely because of their race, is reprehensible. But neither Charles Ogletree nor any other prominent black intellectual I know would endorse any such statement.
In that same month, Andrew Breitbart, perhaps one of the most divisive figures in American political discourse, published a misleading video of Shirley Sherrod. Ms. Sherrod was forced to resign from her position at the Georgia State Rural Development Office of the US Department of Agriculture despite the fact that the allegations were untrue.
Last night, Andrew Breitbart (apparently from beyond the grave) was at it again. This time he and his cronies at Breitbart.com released a video clip of a young Obama at Harvard law school hugging Professor Derrick Bell, the world-renowned legal scholar and one of the foremost black intellectuals of his time, who passed away last October. Breitbart suggests that black people can’t be trusted to govern, by linking Obama to Bell.
http://www.alternet.org/...
But what exactly is wrong with Ogletree or Bell? Ogletree was reprimanded for plagiarism but that doesn’t make him into this vicious anti-white, anti-American, black supremacist.
In the words of his Harvard Law School colleague Alan Dershowitz who responded in writing to an attack on Ogletree by neocon David Horowitz:
“in all the years I have known Ogletree, both as a student and colleague, I have never heard him express anti-American or anti-white sentiments. Nor does Horowitz quote or cite a single word uttered by Ogletree, beyond his support for reparations, that would justify such a defamatory characterization. “
http://www.alandershowitz.com/...
There is nothing inherently racist about desiring reparations for slavery. Reparations have occurred before in our history, one notable example being the reparations directed towards Japanese Americans. So reparations have a legal and historical precedent.
Furthermore, Glenn Beck’s charge that Ogletree supported killing white people is fallacious. I demand that Beck produce the quote where Ogletree says this and either…put up or shut up!
The same people that have went after Ogletree, notably David Horowitz also went after Derrick Bell. David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine published this article defaming the late professor Bell, which reads in part:
“Bell endorsed a journal called Race Traitor, whose stated aim is “to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin.” Moreover, the publication’s guiding principle is: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” In 1999 Bell signed on to a Race Traitor article that stated: “If the task of the nineteenth century was to overthrow slavery, and the task of the twentieth century was to end legal segregation, the key to solving this country’s problems in the twenty-first century is to abolish the white race as a social category—in other words, eradicate white supremacy entirely.””
http://frontpagemag.com/...
For a casual reader of the FrontPage Magazine article, the impression is given that white-supremacy is the central basis of Critical Race Theory and this is what Joel Pollak asserted. Such an understanding comes from a lack of understanding Critical Race Theory, which Bell was a proponent of.
Bell did not mean that America is full of white-supremacists. From Slate:
It’s true that Bell often used that loaded term to describe what he saw as an entrenched racial hierarchy. He didn’t mean, however, that America is full of white supremacists, in the Ku Klux Klan sense. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic note in “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” those who subscribe to it believe that racism can be an everyday fact of life for people of color even if whites rarely notice it.
In sum,
theorists argue that what many Americans think of as the "white race" does not describe a distinct group of people but rather a social construct that serves to benefit some groups and marginalize others. And unlike some strands of academic and legal thought, critical race theory has an open and activist agenda, with an emphasis on storytelling and personal experience. It’s about righting wrongs, not just questing after knowledge.
But Bell and his fellow theorists, who include Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, were not radical in the sense of advocating extreme tactics to achieve political ends, like Greenpeace or the Irish Republican Army. They fought their battles in the halls of academia, not on the streets. And many of their ideas are not radical today in the sense of being outside the mainstream: Critical race theory is widely taught and studied, not only in law but in sociology, education, and other fields. And it is part of the mainstream debates over affirmative action, immigration, and hate-crime laws.
http://www.slate.com/...
What Bell has endorsed and spread in academia is not morally reprehensible. No human being or a group of men can be the masters of another, the superiors of another or socially and exclusively dominant over another if we are to maintain human equality a concept enshrined in the Constitution.
Bell fought against White privilege and White Supremacy, not against White citizens (we should note that race is simply an abstract and does not exist in reality so when Bell wishes to eradicate the white race, he does not mean genocide, ethnic cleansing of white men, but rather the concept of what he deems to be “in other words White Supremacy.”).
Civil Rights groups such as the NAAC P and the SPLC fight against white supremacy all the time, so Bell’s ideas are not far from the mainstream by today’s standards or by the standards of his time.
In any case, President Obama has never endorsed Bell’s Critical Race Theory publically as a politician nor has he endorsed the Ogletree’s desire for reparations. What lies within his human mind and human heart we will never know unless it is expressed.
Hence, without knowing what Obama really thinks of Critical Race Theory or reparations it would be deplorable to defame him with guilt-by-association tactics. He is not his brother’s keeper, or in this sense, his professor’s keeper