“Open your hearts and open you minds…” The Obama-Derrick Bell connection

“Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.” ~Barack Obama

Obama's Beloved Law Professor: Derrick Bell
J. Christian Adams reports: Breitbart.com has revealed that while at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama embraced the racially charged cause of professor Derrick Bell.
Both Obama and Bell demanded that Harvard hire professors on the basis of race. Obama and other students rallied to Bell’s side after Bell quit teaching in an attempt to force Harvard to implement race-based hiring policies.
Other archived video tapes I have reviewed reveal that Bell espouses racial ideas deeply at odds with American values--and did so, adamantly, while at Harvard Law School.
The Obama-Bell connection is the latest in a pattern of Barack Obama’s associations with individuals who promoted a racially divisive America.
In 2008, America learned that Obama attended, and had his children baptized, in a church run by the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright. After the Obama campaign launched a successful existential war to have the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remain a household name only to Fox News viewers, Americans dreamed an Obama presidency would usher in a post-racial era.
That never materialized.
Instead, Professor Derrick Bell’s racial world view is now manifesting in the policies of the Obama administration, particularly in Eric Holder’s Justice Department. That’s why Obama’s radical associations in the past matter.
That’s also why Senator Obama’s appearance with New Black Panther Party President, Malik Zulu Shabazz in Selma, Alabama, matters. I detail the 2007 Selma event and photographs with Obama and Shabazz in my book, Injustice.
Andrew Breitbart courageously published other photos of Obama and Shabazz. The leftist photographer prohibited my publisher (Regnery) from using some of the photos. He knew how incendiary they were, and so did Andrew. Remember, Malik Zulu Shabazz is the very defendant whom Eric Holder let off in the New Black Panther voter intimidation case.
Policies of racial division and racial preference have characterized this administration, even if most in the media have failed willingly to cover them.
Nobody should celebrate this lost chance for national racial healing many voters thought would characterize his Presidency. Nobody should be glad that the Obama administration turns a blind eye, for example, toward racially motivated violence like the mob attacks in Wisconsin or Dayton.
That Obama gravitated toward Bell, Wright, and Bill Ayers and all the others we now know about says something about the man.
Contrary to those who might praise Derrick Bell, America is the worse off because of his ideas.
Bell did more than advocate for race-based hiring. He was perhaps the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory called Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory, in a nutshell, argues that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress “people of color.” It argues for “structural racism”--the idea that American institutions are aligned against blacks, whether the oppressor is the criminal justice system, a cabdriver without a fare, businesses, government, Domino's Pizza, banks, or the police.
Critical Race Theory does not view the law as applying equally to all Americans, but advocates for racially unfair implementation of the law to right past injustice.
Most of the crackpot racial grievance you hear today has a philosophical foundation in Critical Race Theory. It is a counter-American, collectivist idea. Reparations, race-based hiring and excusing New Black Panther voter intimidation are some of the evil fruits of Critical Race Theory.
Bell’s history might be insignificant if he kept it to himself. But he didn’t. He used his professorship to export this worldview to students--students like Obama, who later used their teaching posts to bring Bell's views to the next generation.
In the Obama tapes (that have been revealed so far), we find the future President calling on Harvard students to “open up your hearts, and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.” Race relations in our country are worse off because too many people followed Obama’s advice.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/08/obamas-beloved-law-professor-derrick-bell

Obama: 'Open up your hearts and your minds' to racialist prof
Ben Shapiro reports: Barack Obama was as close or closer to Derrick Bell than he ever was to Jeremiah Wright. Obama didn’t merely sit in the pews – or not -- for Derrick Bell. He didn’t just hang out with Derrick Bell for prayers. He said: “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.” …this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/07/buzzefeed-selectively-edits-obama-tape

Bell, Farrakhan BFFs
Ben Shapiro also reports: Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well is a fascinating take on racial politics. But he saves his most flattering words for an anti-Semite who called Judaism a “gutter religion,” believes that H1N1 flu vaccine was created to depopulate the earth, supported racist monster Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and received backing from Moammar Gadhafi: Louis Farrakhan.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/07/bell-farrakhan

White House: No Comment on Derrick A. Bell's 2010 Visits
Dan Riehl reports: Via Lachlan Markay at Heritage, we learn a Derrick A. Bell visited the Obama White House twice in 2010. The White House did not return a request for comment. The visits were on 1/29/2010, a Friday and 1/31/2010, a Sunday. For now, a web search of news reports did not turn up why Bell may have been in Washington that particular weekend.
Heritage could not independently confirm that the Derrick A. Bell listed is the same individual who spoke at the rally. The White House  did not return a request for comment.
In the video, Obama tells the crowd to “Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of  professor Derrick Bell.” Those words tended to be quite controversial. Bell is widely credited with pioneering the field of Critical Race  Theory, a radical school of legal thought that holds that the American legal and political systems are inherently racist.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/08/white-house-no-comment-on-derrick-a-bells-2010-visits

Derrick Bell and Eric Holder's 'Nation of Cowards'
Joel B. Pollak reports: The revelation of the relationship between President Barack Obama and the late Critical Race Theory professor Derrick Bell sheds light not only on Obama’s past beliefs, but his present governing philosophy, particularly at the Department of Justice.
It is interesting, for example, to reconsider Attorney General Eric Holder’s incendiary statement in 2009 that America is a “nation of cowards” with a view towards the influence of Bell’s ideas on Obama's cohort of left-wing legal minds. … The most famous instance of such discrimination is the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, which was dropped by Holder despite the fact that it was an open-and-shut case involving serious violations of voting rights.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/09/critical-race-theory-and-a-nation-of-coward

Obama Biographers, Journalists Covered Up Radical Derrick Bell Video
Charles C. Johnson reports: The failure of the mainstream media to examine Barack Obama's support for Critical Race Theory founder Derrick Bell is one of the most glaring cases of journalistic malpractice and neglect in recent memory.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/07/obama-biographers-journalists-covered-up-derrick-bell-video

[VIDEO]
Bell: Farrakhan 'Great Hero For The People' -- In a 1992 MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour Broadcast Professor Derrick Bell praises radical, anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

[VIDEO]
Bell: 'I Live To Harass White Folks'

[VIDEO]
Derrick Bell: My Views Are Too 'Jarring' -- While media apologists try to "mainstream" critical race theory and Prof. Derrick Bell, you don't have to look farther than his own words to find evidence that his ideas were radical and way outside of the mainstream of America.

[VIDEO]
Derrick Bell: I Write My Views In Fiction Because They're Too 'Threatening' -- "I find that my views have at least a better chance of being heard if I can place those views in the context of a fable, of a story. During the telling of which, or the reading of which, the individual is able to pull back to not feel threatened or involved."

[VIDEO]
Bell: USA Must Admit We're Permanently Racist

[VIDEO]
Derrick Bell: Racism 'Important Stabilizing Function In Society'

[VIDEO]
Bell: Racism 'Permanent Part' Of US Culture

[VIDEO]
Sowell Destroys 'Totalitarian' Bell; 'Ideological Intolerance'

[VIDEO]
Sowell Eviscerates Bell, Obama -- Intellectual giant Thomas Sowell appeared on the Dennis Miller Show this morning and gave his first-hand account of radical racialist professor Derrick bell and the man he influenced, Barack Obama. It does not end well for Mr. Sowell or Mr. Obama.

[VIDEO]
Thomas Sowell Hammers 'Despicable' Derrick Bell; Compares To Hitler -- Was Derrick Bell a radical when Barack Obama told us all to open our hearts and minds? Thomas Sowell was asked about Bell at the time. Here’s what he said:
SOWELL: Oh, political purposes. I just a couple of days ago was told by someone from Wellesley that there's a divestment campaign at Wellesley, demonstrations, the whole thing, and that those black girls who did not want to participate in that were threatened with violence -- and that's not unique. At Stanford the Hispanic students, some Hispanic students, have complained that the Hispanic establishment has threatened them if they don't want to go along with what's being said and done, and they claim that only 15% of the Hispanic students at Stanford have ever attended a single event sponsored by the Hispanic establishment, which speaks boldly in their name. Ah, and so you have this kind of thing going on at these schools across the country. Again, notice, that once, once you let in the students who cannot make, meet the academic standards, you're going to end up having to let in professors who can't meet the academic standards. You're going to have to create courses that don't meet the academic standards.
LAMB: Correct me on the, on the names and everything. Derrick Bell?
SOWELL: Yes.
LAMB: Harvard Law School, black man.
SOWELL: Yes.
LAMB: Threatened the law school if they didn't hire a black woman, he's going, he's leaving?
SOWELL: Well, if I understand it correctly, he's taking unpaid leave until such time as they hire a woman of color, as he says. Well, he's also said that by black, he does not mean skin color, he means those who are really black, not those who think white and look black. And so what he is really saying is he wants ideological conformity in the people that are hired to fill this position. That's not uncommon either. I know a black woman, for example, who had a Ph.D. -- she's had a book published, she has another contract on another book, she's taught at a couple of very nice places, she has a devil of a time getting a job -- not a job in a prestigious institution, a job teaching at a college. And the reason is that she gets shot down, blackballed, whatever, by people who don't like her ideology. That's happening not only racially, it's also happening where race is not an issue. In a law school, I learned recently, there's a woman who was being considered for a tenured position, and all the men voted for her and all the woman voted against her, because she does not follow radical feminism, and so you're getting these ideological tests, so that at the very time that there's all this mouthing of the word diversity, there is this extremely narrow ideological conformity that is being enforced wherever people have the power to enforce it.
LAMB: What did you think of Derrick Bell's whole plan?
SOWELL: Well, his chances of success will depend on whether or not he has overestimated his importance to the Harvard Law School. I think it would be a tragedy if they caved in, and I was very pleased to see that they seemed to show some backbone, which is quite rare among academics.
LAMB: Now, what do you think of the press treatment of him?
SOWELL: It's been quite gentle.
LAMB: You mean, is he a hero?
SOWELL: To me?
LAMB: No. Basically, I mean, from the press coverage, you've seen, is he a hero to the ...?
SOWELL: Well, he's looked at as an idealist who is self-sacrificing and so on. I suppose one could, if one wanted to look at it that way, have seen Hitler that way in his early days. It's just a question of where that kind of idealism leads. He has launched a despicable attack on a young black professor at the law school who doesn't go along with this. A young man named Randall Kennedy, who has written a very thoughtful, intelligent article last June in the Harvard Law Review, questioning some of the assumptions that people are making, people like Derrick Bell and doing it in a very gentlemanly as well as very logical way, empirical way, and that's not what they want. They want the conclusion to be that -- they want him to march in lock step and he won't do it, and they're doing their best to make life impossible for him.
LAMB: What do you think Harvard will do?
SOWELL: I've heard that Kennedy -- and I don't know this -- I've heard that he has tenure, so I think that he may be all right.
LAMB: But, I mean, what do you think they'll do with ...
SOWELL: Derrick Bell?
LAMB: Yes.
SOWELL: I hope that they will resist it, and since it's gotten so much publicity, I'm not sure they could stand to cave in to it. I was very pleased to see that Alan Dershowitz of Harvard had criticized this and that he picked up the fact that what Bell is really asking for is not only that people be hired by race, but that they be hired to fit Derek Bell's ideology.
LAMB: What would happen if this was going on at Stanford Law School?
SOWELL: They'd have caved in long ago.
LAMB: Stanford Law School would have?
SOWELL: Yes. I think so. It's a judgment call, but that's my judgment.
LAMB: Why would they do it so quickly?
SOWELL: Just looking at their track record. They have perfected the technique of preemptive surrender.