Voting Station

Derrick Bell

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Educator

The Resume

    (November 6, 1930-October 5, 2011)
    Born in Hill District (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania
    Full name was Derrick Albert Bell Jr.
    Became the first tenured African-American professor of law at Harvard Law School (1969)
    Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law (1980-85)
    Professor at New York University (1991-2011)
    Credited as a pioneer in the development of Critical Race Theory (CRT)
    Author of 'Race, Racism and American Law' (1973)
    Other written works include 'Faces at the Bottom of the Well' (1992), 'And We Are Not Saved' (1987), 'Confronting Authority' (1994), 'Gospel Choirs' (1996), 'Constitutional Conflicts' (1997), 'Afrolantica Legacies' (1998), 'Silent Covenant' (2004), and 'Ethical Ambition' (2002)

Why he might be annoying:

    Gloria Steinem hailed him as 'an honorary woman.'
    He attained his tenured position at Harvard due to pressure from black students on campus to hire a professor of color.
    He later threatened to resign from Harvard law faculty if the university didn't adopt Affirmative Action policies pertaining to the hiring of women faculty.
    He predicated CRT on the notion that 'racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.'
    He penned a story about whites waging a genocide against blacks and hunting the survivors down to sell them off as slaves to outer space aliens (which he called 'The Space Traders').
    He famously attacked colleague Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for writing a New York Times Op-ed condemning African-American anti-Semitism, professing to have been 'furious.'
    His reasoning went as follows: 'Even if everything he said was true, it was inexcusable not to mention what might have motivated blacks to feel this way, and to fail to talk about the Jewish neoconservative racists who are undermining blacks in every way they can.'
    He was posthumously inserted into the heat of the 2012 Presidential election after a 1990 video was circulated by Breitbart and Fox News purporting to show him and then-student Barack Obama sharing an embrace on Harvard campus during a protest, and showing Obama asking students to 'open their hearts and minds' to Bell's words (Mar. 2012).
    The video of his 'hug' with Obama was treated as a 'smoking gun' by Republicans intent on using it as proof of the President's latent Marxist radicalism, with Sarah Palin suggesting during a Hannity appearance that he was 'a racist' who wanted to bring America 'back to the days before the Civil War.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    He served as an Air Force officer during the Korean War.
    Much of his written work is believed to have provided the blueprint for The Black Lives Matter Movement.
    He resigned his position with the civil rights division of the US Department of Justice, after being asked to relinquish his NAACP membership, which they deemed 'a conflict.'
    He was described as kind and well-mannered even to the conservative white students who openly disagreed with him.
    He took several unpaid leaves of absence from Harvard to protest the campus' lack of faculty diversity (at the time, the university had 60 tenured professors, only three of which were black men, five women, and none of whom were women of color).
    He staged a five-day sit-in at his office to protest Harvard's failure to grant tenure to professors on staff whose work promoted CRT (1986).
    His efforts were eventually realized when Harvard appointed Lani Guinier as the law school's first black female tenured professor (1998).
    Two University of Pittsburg fellowship positions are named in his honor.
    His also the namesake for the community law clinic, which provides legal assistance to local low-income residents, renamed the Derrick Bell Community Legal Clinic.
    Most of the Right-Wing attacks on his character either backfired, proved ineffective, or came off as extremely tasteless (given that he had died not six months prior).
    The tone got to be ugly enough that his widow, Janet Dewart Bell, had to make a public statement on the Ed Schultz Show to call the attacks on her late husband 'outrageous,' further saying 'Derrick was a man of courage and conviction and was always standing up for justice, no matter who it was.'

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 11 Votes: 90.91% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 35 Votes: 94.29% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 66 Votes: 54.55% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 15 Votes: 86.67% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 11 Votes: 54.55% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 119 Votes: 56.30% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 109 Votes: 65.14% Annoying