My wife says I spend my life trying to teach white folks. I'm not so sure I'm proud of it, but she's right. — Derrick Bell Copy Share Image
“The Portland school board's policy equated integration and racial assimilation. This policy, Rist explains, is a "means of socializing nonwhite students to act, speak, and believe very much like white students." It leaves dominant group values intact, does no damage to notions of white superiority, and helps to gain the support of those whites who view it as a means… — Derrick Bell Copy Share
“What neither Warren nor most of the rest of us recognized was that segregation was not, as Nirej Sekhorn put it, simply a "taint" or "bias." It was the dominant interpretive framework for a social structure that organizes the American garden's very configuration. Segregation was not merely an oppressive legal regime, it consolidated the imaginative lens through which Americans would… — Derrick Bell Copy Share
“Regrettably, I paid far less attention to all those students less able to overcome the hostility and the sense of alienation they faced in… — Derrick Bell Copy Share Image
However self-sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation -- to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and… — Derrick Bell Copy Share Image
“As with most voluntary school integration programs, dispersal of the black children was the norm. In Portland, no more than forty-five black children were bused to any single elementary school, and white schools of four-hundred to five-hundred pupils received as few as four and in most instances only ten to fifteen black students. Brush Elementary, the all-white school Rist selected… — Derrick Bell Copy Share
“A few white children were friendly, but others were hostile or simply distant. Teachers unthinkingly added to both problems by physically separating black students… — Derrick Bell Copy Share Image
“Today, many whites oppose all social reform as "welfare programs for blacks." They ignore the fact that poor whites have employment, education, and social service needs that differ from the condition of poor blacks by a margin that, without a racial scorecard, becomes difficult to measure. In summary, the blatant involuntary sacrifice of black rights to further white interests, so… — Derrick Bell Copy Share
“Harry Belafonte explained: [T]he Second World War happened, and my mother told me that the fight against Hitler was our fight, and I went off, just like that. We were fighting against tyranny, fighting for freedom. But when we-the Black soldiers-came home, we found it was business as usual. There were no changes in the segregation laws. There was no… — Derrick Bell Copy Share
It appears that my worst fears have been realized: we have made progress in everything yet nothing has changed — Derrick Bell Copy Share Image
Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor. — Derrick Bell Copy Share Image
However self-sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation - to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and… — Derrick Bell Copy Share Image
“Here is a foundation for understanding today what was clear to only a few fifty years earlier. Now we can see how the state-mandated racial segregation that was the subject of the Brown litigation did not suddenly appear, as a former student, Nirej Sekhorn, put it, like a bad weed in an otherwise-beautiful racial garden, a weed the Court sought… — Derrick Bell Copy Share
