Why Critical Race Theory For Me
A story of a friendship, Derrick Bell, and an abstract embrace of nonlinear time
My path to fully embracing Critical Race Theory as a writer, as a historian, and as a Black man took me 25 years. The first time I ever heard the term was in 1990, just barely 20 years old, still fully engaged in The Matrix of the American experiment and meritocracy. By the time I had hugged, kissed, caressed, and inhaled and exhaled in rhythm with Critical Race Theory, I had hit my mid-40s, no longer capable of believing in anything special in the US or West. At least, anything beyond their stiff-necked and hard-headed ways of believing themselves above their own toxic stench of racist capitalism and the damage it continues to cause to people and this planet.
It all began because of my one-time classmate and friend of more than ten years, Charles H. Houston, Jr. (1944-2018). Charles H. Houston, Sr. (1895-1950), the vice dean of Howard University Law School from 1928 to 1934, the key architect and engineer behind the dismantling of the “separate but equal” clause in the US Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision in Brown v. Board of Education, was Charles’ father. The native Baltimorean had retired after more than two decades for Gulf Oil, which brought him somehow to Pittsburgh, where he had enrolled as a graduate student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History in 1989-90. I had used my analytical powers to find a loophole to take a graduate-level history course as a third-year junior, Comparative Slavery, one of the courses in which Charles had enrolled.
I had in fact met and had conversations with Charles before, partly because Charles was incredibly extroverted and partly because of my eventual MA and PhD advisor at Pitt in Larry Glasco (at least, before I crossed the bridge into Schenley Park to finish my doctorate with Joe William Trotter, Jr. at Carnegie Mellon University). And also because, despite my introverted tendencies and my soft-spokenness, I am an amazingly nosy-ass person. I successfully sparred for an entire semester with first and second-year graduate students like Charles in Comparative Slavery, some who, like Charles, were more than double my age. The only reason I could do this was because I could read a turgid historical tome faster than Portland Trail Blazer Damian Lillard can break down a defense, and because of this weird ability to draw counterintuitive connections between the scholarly and everyday. And that impressed Charles enough to take me under his wing off and on for the rest of that year.
It was through him I ended up going to a talk about the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and meeting the great legal scholar and Critical Race theorist Derrick A. Bell. The self-exiled Harvard Law professor was also a native Black Pittsburgher, and was following up the success of his 1987 bestseller And We Are Not Saved with the essays that would lead to another book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. He had taken a two-year sabbatical from Harvard Law because his colleagues refused to grant tenure to an Asian American woman professor, a sabbatical that would become permanent after 1992.
“The Racial Preference Licensing Act” talk Bell gave at Pitt’s Law School on Tuesday, October 23, 1990 was an indirect response to the continual refusal to hire and promote highly credentialed Black folk and people of color in academia and a direct response to the constant battles over integration across the US. The reading was from a draft version of the same essay that I would read in full in Faces at the Bottom of the Well as a PhD student two years later. It was an earth-shattering talk for me. I never, ever thought that anyone could combine fictional elements in their writing with the nonfictional. This was a year before I picked up and read Octavia Butler’s Kindred for the first time, and aside from The Bible, Aesop’s Fables, and Br’er Rabbit, I hadn't read or heard of any allegories as a serious writing method.
It wasn’t that Bell’s allegory about allowing private entities to exclude Blacks from their presence as students, workers, and customers in exchange for paying a reparations tax was particularly well written. I had no basis of comparison to know for sure. What I did know was that Bell’s was the most radical take I had ever heard about possible US futures. Bell argued the Civil Rights Movement, in all its success, had failed to fundamentally upend the racist social order that is always the US. He was telling the crowd of Black and white progressive law students, civil rights nepo-babies like Charles, and precocious thinkers like me to accept racism as permanent, immutable, and incapable of change to achieve the multiracial democratic fantasy of his generation. The sooner we as Black folk and we as Americans accepted this, the better off the US would be.
I understood what Bell wanted me to glean from his talk, but it would be decades before I’d give up on the meritocracy facade. Charles, though, was livid. His face, a light, fourteen-karat gold of brown, was as red as oxidized copper. He had me come with him after the talk so he could get in line with the law students and tell Bell a thing or two. The president of Pitt’s Black Law Student Association and a couple of white progressives joined us. For the next seven minutes, I watched Charles and these students argue back and forth with Bell. They never derided the issue of reparations, a much bigger issue now in 2023. No, the argument was mostly about Bell abandoning the civil rights agenda and his belief in US racism as permanent, suggesting that if racism ever did die in the US, there would no longer be a US as we have known it to be. “You should be ashamed of yourself!,” Charles sort-o- yelled while walking away, ending his part in arguing. “Well, I for one enjoyed your talk, Professor Bell. Thank you!,” I quickly said despite the rolled eyes from the “civil rights is all!” set as I left to catch up with my friend.
Charles and I had a bit of a falling out over this same issue more than a decade later as I put the finishing touches to Fear of a “Black” America. Any portrayal of the Black elite set’s self-interest, colorism. patriarchy, and respectability politics during the Civil Rights Movement was a betrayal to him. Any suggestion that the gains of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s was mostly symbolic and not long-lasting enough for most ordinary African Americans sparked a letter, a postcard, or a telephone call where he pegged me as “too young to understand.” After I published the book in 2004, I think we exchanged cards a couple of times, but that was it until I learned Charles died in 2018.
By the time I published Fear of a “Black” America, I had devolved from believing in the meritocracy in general to believing in it just for me. If I could somehow make merit work for me and mine, it didn’t particularly matter if it was a lie akin to The Matrix, the pulling of a lying world over our eyes.
Derrick Bell was helpful to me here, too. I went to his book talk at DC’s MLK Library in 2000, as he read from a chapter in his Afrolantica Legacies. It was not the bestseller his previous books had been, as evidenced by the location of his talk. But his message that we all must consider the possibility of the US wanting Black folk gone, or conversely, that we may need to leave no matter what the US attempts to do to stem its own racism, stuck with me. I also got him to sign my well-worn copy of Faces at the Bottom of the Well, with him admonishing me “to keep working at your craft.” Three years later, Bell read over what would be my first scholarly article, “Rules to Live By,” the application of his rules of racial standing to everyday scenarios of how racism and individual racist incidents play out in the world of media and public opinion.
I took the wrong lessons from those other encounters with Bell. I assumed that my talents were already so unique and so well-honed, my achievements were so obvious, that I could tack the rough winds and shallow, roiling seas of American racism without crashing into its jagged rocks beneath. Even this man who has spent the last eight years looking into the relationship between Western and American narcissism and racism in the US was not immune to his own moments of narcissism, American style.
Of course I was wrong. Of course being twice as good or three times as good as a monolithic block of allegedly genius — but really, mediocre — white men was not good enough and didn’t really matter. The only thing that often mattered by the Great Recession and the years after it was who I knew and who knew me. My connections, the influencers who could move the gatekeepers out of my way, or the lack of such connections and such influencers. Of course, by my mid-40s, I felt like a fool. I missed the last main point of Bell’s work (and Delgado’s, and Patricia J. Williams’, and Octavia Butler’s, if I’m being completely honest). The permanence of racism cannot be negotiated with. None of us as individuals will ever have enough talent, enough achievements, even enough wealth to make the impact of American racism fade away. We all need help, we all need a crew, especially as Black folk, to navigate this Matrix well enough to succeed, survive, and sustain ourselves for a lifetime, to ensure the generations we birth can do the same.
That is why Critical Race Theory for me. As I have published elsewhere, Critical Race Theory isn’t even a theory (if it ever was). It is established fact. And because it is, anyone thinking about the past, present, or future of Black people anywhere and everywhere should consider all the insidious ways in which The Matrix of racism in the US and the West moves and flows. None of us can become Morpheus or Neo without putting in the deep and disillusioning work that Critical Race Theory requires, including me.