the University of Oregon’s law students, Bell said: “I saw a part of my role here as teaching by example that which I consider essential to the successfulprofessional: a willingness to speak and act in accordance with one’s beliefs even when those views cast you in an unpopular minority. ” Bell is aformer Deputy Director ofthe U. S. Department ofHealth Education and Welfare’s Office of Civil Rights. He served as a staffattorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and as director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty. He taught law at Harvard University from 1969 through 1980 and litigated civil rights cases throughout the South in the 1960s. Bell is also well known for his writings on racism and poverty and specifically on the long-term effects offoowa vs..Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ordered the desegregation ofpublic schools. Clinton Street Quarterly.: Last month the Washington Post ran an article that talked about how although blacks appear to be more integrated into American society in the eighties, the actual statistics show that blacks aren't better off today than twenty years ago. What are your views about this? What do you say to people who think that the battle against racism in this country has been won? Bell: The article is correct. Not only are we not better integrated, we are not better off, and they’re almost two different things. I guess at this point if the statistics didn’t show the tremendous gap in unemployment between blacks and whites, the tremendous gap in income, health, mortality, infant mortality, I wouldn't really mind that we are not integrated. That -would still be a challenge, but it would be one we would be prepared to undertake. The fact is that those of us in the civil rights movement, the lawyers and what have you, adopted the principle of equal opportunity as the answer to overt segregation and discrimination—no blacks hired, no blacks admitted, no blacks wanted. We felt that was all we would need. We could have a color-blind Constitution. We ignored two things. First, we ignored the serious impact of generations of overt discrimination that had left their mark in the skills, the abilities, the internal affliction that comes when a society tells an individual or a group that you’re nothing over a long period of time. You couldn’t just bring people up to the starting line and say, “Everyone’s equal now, go.” The second thing is that we ignored the cause of all the discrimination that had gone before. That cause was not segregation. Segregation was just one method of carrying out the policy, as slavery was before that. And when we got rid of slavery and we got rid of segregation, we naively felt that that’s all there was, and we said equal opportunity. Well, we now find that equal opportunity is being used as a replacement for segregation to maintain blacks in a subordinate, exploitable position in our society. Many of us who helped bring that about have an awful lot of debt to pay. The article was absolutely right, and if it suggested that in many ways blacks are worse off than we were twenty years You can say, “Well, Derrick Bell made it. How come the rest of them can ’t? And here’s a Superintendent of Schools in Portland and he’s black, and the Music Director of the Oregon Symphony he’s black. They made it. The opportunities must be open. ” Well that’s crazy. ago, I think that a strong argument could be made that that is correct too. Sure we didn’t have blacks as deans of major white law schools and we didn't have blacks running around television as star athletes and entertainers, in ones and twos, in this position and that across the land. We do have a larger black middle class than we had then. But overall, I think the argument can be made that we are, in fact, worse off now than we were twenty years ago. CSQ: Can you give an example of how equal opportunity has been used? Bell: It simply builds on what was before. And because memories of Americans are short—particularly having to do with our historical wrongdoings—it seems infinitely unfair to treat everybody alike and to ignore, if you ever knew, how maltreated blacks and other minorities were before the equal opportunity rationale was adopted by the courts, by the legislatures, by the society. So now we have a situation in which the signs are down, in which any memory of overt discrimination is fast fading if not already gone, and any suggestion that blacks should be treated differently than anybody elsefcreates a wealth of debate, whether you’re in the ivory tower or at the local corner bar. Twenty years ago everybody knew—who wanted to know—how badly blacks were treated. Being the last to be hired and first to be fired even from menial work. Now these things tend to be fading and the dire plight of blacks is somehow made the fault of blacks. Their morality is not up to it. There was just a public outcry to fire a woman who co-authored a book suggesting that it was the jungle mentality or something like that which was responsible for all of this. It’s very easy. It fits right into the traditional stereotype that has never been worked out. And as opposed to dealing with these problems seriously, it’s much easier to at least say, covertly, well that’s why most of them don’t succeed. The fact that a few blacks here and there have done well provides another rationalization for doing nothing. You can say, “Well, Derrick Bell made it. How come the rest of them can’t?" And here’s a Superintendent of Schools in Portland and he’s black, and the Music Director of the Oregon Symphony, he’s black. They made it. The opportunities must be open. And if the rest of them really work, they could make it too. Well that’s crazy. Often the blacks who make it are twice as good as the whites who are competing with them. Or it’s just circumstances that enable one or two to get ahead. But I know from my own experience in legal education, it’s one thing to get the first black hired on a faculty of a law school in this country; it’s another thing to get the second black hired, or the third. There are no signs any more, and in many ways it’s more difficult, because everyone feels that we’re doing these things on the basis of merit. And if you don’t meet our standards of merit then of course you can’t be hired, you can’t be promoted and you’re out of it. You need to bring yourselves up the way my grandparents did, as the Irish, or Italian or Poles would say. Of course the world has changed a great deal since their grandparents came over. When their grandparents came over we didn’t have a civil service. People got jobs because you promised to vote the right way. There were jobs to be gotten where you used a pick and shovel. You didn’t need much training or skills for that. That’s all changed now. So that you have a tremendous amount of unemployment—an awful lot among blacks and even more among whites—in which people are becoming technologically unemployed. They may never get jobs again. Industries in which they had skills pack up, close down, move away. Taiwanese are now doing the jobs that traditionally Photographs (Except Derrick Bell) by RichardJ. Brown w Clinton St. Quarterly
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