Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

This piece, more a fable than a short story, is a meta-critical one that allows Bell to turn his lens on how critical race theorists (including himself) examine oppression as it unfolds in the real world. The story has multiple narrative frames: it is really a story about a meeting, and inside that story is one about the text of a report that emerged from that meeting; the narrative frame is the conversation between Geneva and the professor, and the frames multiply if one reads the notes and realizes that Bell, the author, has engaged in just this kind of critical examination of racism at Harvard and other law schools.

Using so many frames forces the reader to pay attention not only to the content of Bell’s arguments about the permanence of racism but also how he makes those arguments. On top of forcing the reader to call into question accepted conventions for making legal arguments about race, “A Law Professor’s Protest” includes an explicit discussion of important critical race theorists of the day. Bell has the law professor identify their rationale for using insights and approaches from multiple disciplines. Doing so allows people subject to multiple forms of oppression to be heard and to form alliances with each other on the bases of the overlap in their oppressions; the story puts this approach in action.

Bell remains conscious throughout the book that using fiction and other genres instead of the usual legal writing may open him to charges of being a bad scholar who will lose whatever racial standing he has on the basis of his academic credentials. He writes in this critique when he describes the deans’ disapproval of the work of the law professor persona due to both its form and its open discrediting of Harvard. Their objections weren’t just about the content, supposedly. Their objections were to the audience and format of his protest. Bell, having been the object of these exact critiques in real life and having given up important academic roles multiple times to publicize inequality in higher education, knows that exposing institutional racism can be professionally debilitating. His point seems to be that despite this danger, there is something about business-as-usual legal scholarship that makes it a poor tool for including a full picture of the experiences of African Americans in America.

This criticism reflects his consistent critique that too much focus on law on the books and idealistic principles blinds people to the realities of race. Bell traces this problem back to societal racism but also to the way that law schools, lofty goals notwithstanding, have a gatekeeping function that reproduces more and more unequal outcomes. Bell, the writer, was a giant among African American legal scholars, so when he criticizes the outcomes in schools like Harvard’s law school, he has real credibility. His focus on connecting what he is doing in the story and volume as a whole to an emerging movement of critical race theorists helps the reader see that critical race theorists are presenting worthy scholarship, even if it looks a little different from conventional scholarship.

This emphasis on how important an openness to experimenting with other forms is in representing racial realism more fully prepares the reader for even more experimental approaches to making legal arguments, specifically, the two science fiction pieces that close the book.