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

In this piece, Bell asks the reader to think critically about two common approaches to confronting racism—through education and empathy. Bell is able to make his point that these approaches won’t work by relying on the conventions of multiple genres and engagement with other literary texts.

This story relies upon a technology that skips over traditional anti-racist education efforts, making “Racism’s Secret Bonding” speculative fiction—work that imagines what the world would be like as a result of some key difference from the real world. This piece is science fiction because of the use of technology to force white people to directly access racism’s harms makes. The mechanics of just how three African American scientists manage to transmit both facts and emotions into the minds of white people are not clear, but the fantastic nature of this technology highlights the extreme efforts it would take to finally get through to masses of white people.

The key to why the technology inspires change is that it doesn’t really appeal just to emotion or even empathy. Instead, the grind of hearing about and feeling the psychological impact of racism is painful, making the decision to do something about it an act of self-interest, even in this fantasy about America finally addressing racism. In other words, it still takes making racism too costly for white people for real change to come because racism is a core part of American identity.

Bell uses allusions to and direct quotes from a wide range of genres and fields to make his point. There is an explicit reference to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a critical race theorist most known for advancing intersectionality, the idea that racism, sexism, and other isms overlap, especially in the lives of African American women; here, Bell relies on her argument about poor white people aligning themselves with white elites to explain this racial alliance despite the lack of common economic interests. His use of Crenshaw’s work here shows that even when Bell does rely on legal scholarship, he relies on a school of thought that rejects law-on-the books and instead thinks about people’s lived experiences and law in the real world.

The bulk of the other references and allusions are outside of the field of the law. Bell includes allusions to writers and literary scholars, such as Toni Morrison, belle hooks, and Ralph Ellison to offer insight into the importance of racial scapegoats to American identity. He uses substantial direct quotes from a dystopian fiction story, Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” to illuminate how racism can persist in a society that believes itself to be built on equality. These allusions bear out Bell’s belief that we have to be willing to look outside of traditional law scholarship to examine racism because traditional legal scholarship is not equipped to help most people see the reality of racism. A short story like Le Guin’s, on the other hand, takes complicity far enough out of people’s ordinary reality to get them to see the unpleasant truth that their own lies may well be the result of other forms of complicity.

Another important reference comes at the end of the dialogue, when the professor describes writers on racial reality as figures like the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. There is a very old literary tradition in African American culture in which people like Frederick Douglass, almost all of the ex-slave narrators, and writers during important periods like the Harlem Renaissance and the liberation movements of the 1960s pointed out that racism would essentially doom the American experiment in equality because the country as a whole was hypocritical. Bell’s choice to align the law professor with this tradition sounds a note of despair that is much more pronounced than in the other pieces. This cautionary note prepares the reader for the stunning but depressing premise in “The Space Traders,” which is that the US would happily expel African Americans if given the opportunity.