Derrick Bell’s Analysis of Racism Continues to Shape How We Understand Inequality in America
We will fight for human rights even if white supremacy never ends. We should be inspired by the words of Derrick Bell. According to this famous Black author, Derrick Bell, in his book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary “peaks of progress,” short lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racist patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.
This is a hard-to-face fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance.” We will stay WOKE and fight for human rights as long as necessary, and no power on earth can stop this.
From the Portuguese attempt to dominate the Atlantic slave trade, to the defeat of the Moors in the Canary Islands, and to the Enlightenment, we can see how white supremacy became the long-lasting child of slavery. Capitalism did not create racism or slavery but it did enhance it as an institution. This legacy of hatred did not ever end.
In the 1800s, the horror of being the “wrong skin color” included using black babies as “alligator bait,” burning blacks alive, chopping up their bodies to feed hogs, pouring salt on wounds as torture, and stealing Black bodies from graveyards.
Babies Sold by the Pound
Sometimes, Blacks were poisoned when they refused to pick cotton or back-talked. Women were raped by slave masters and, if pregnant, the women might be whipped until the fetus fell from her body where it might be chopped up before her eyes. At other times, when babies were born, they were sold by the pound at auction blocks.
All honest historians must tell the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of history of the United States or otherwise they are dishonest to say the least. They want to eliminate Black History classes for fear that America was be exposed and will never great in telling the truth.
Related: Jalen Rose Says There’s A ‘Residue’ Of Slavery In The NBA
Blacks and Browns: ‘Suspicious Persons’
You cannot have a democracy unless these issues are exposed and taught to the public. Even now, racist politicians and MAGA forces are trying to deny the horrors of slavery and white supremacy. All must be taught so that this country can begin the long road to rid itself of racial hatred.
Racism is not just part of the past; it is an indelible part of the present. Just walking or driving while Black or Brown, or jogging, can produce frantic cries for the police to come and “investigate” in what is described as a “suspicious” person, and then getting choked to death, or shot. Now, Black and Brown people from Haiti, or from parts of South and Central America, can be kidnapped by ICE police and deported.
Rejecting the Bigots of the Past
Revealing the true facts of history is not intended to make anyone feel bad. No white person should be offended by these facts unless they are bigots or misguided. Face it; everyone has negative relatives in their ancestry, and many alive today have vicious slave owners in their ancestry.
This is a reality to face and to reject the bigots of the past no matter who they are. White supremacy placed in the minds of poor whites that if slavery were abolished their “manhood” would be diminished.
White racist philosophy held that free Black men would go on rampages and rape white women and destroy their family structure, and this would be their reasons for racism to stay around for as long as it has.
Read Next: Fiesta 2026 Parade Schedule
