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

This piece asks the reader to imagine what a law that acknowledges the permanence of racism would look like. Geneva shows up to engage the law professor in Socratic dialogue, a very old instructional method whereby a teacher and a student/audience together engage in questions and answers that clarify beliefs and reveal logical inconsistencies in one’s beliefs. This dialogue allows Bell to explore one of his consistent criticisms of the practice of the law, especially by liberals, in the United States, which is that they ignore several important realities that shape the actions of individuals.

The racial preference licensing act addresses these realities by taking morality out of the equation and adding some disincentives for people who practice discrimination. As in other pieces from the book, the reality that most stands in the way of ending racism is white people see and want to retain the benefits of being white in a society that grants privileges based on racial identity. Most readers, especially those who assume the commitment to equality is a central feature of the contemporary United States, will find the premise of such a law offensive or even cynical.

Bell, in keeping with his effective use of rhetoric elsewhere, directly addresses the objections of this part of his audience by writing those objections and their rebuttals into the dialogue with Geneva Crenshaw. The first objection rebuttal picks up the contrasts between ideals and reality that appear in several other parts of the book. Bell has Geneva label the basis of this dream of equality “integration ideology”(76), a label that puts what many people may see as unquestionable ideals into the realm of a set of beliefs that are subject to critical examination just like any other belief. Her point is that unquestioning acceptance of the integration as a goal shows a lack of logical consistency when we pay attention to the outcomes of these laws (re-segregation).

The second objection to this approach is that appeals to morality are adequate means to stop discrimination. The rebuttal to this objection is one rooted in an understanding of the psychology of racism—people are more likely to engage in racist behavior because they can do so without public exposure. By delving into the psychology of racism and its results in the real world, Bell reinforces that if we want to understand racism, the object of analysis needs to be decision-making in the real world. His assumption here is that people are guided by self-interest instead of appeals to morality.

The third objection is more implied, which is that we can understand racist decision-making using reason. Geneva gets the professor to acknowledge that racism isn’t really based on logical responses to racial difference, making appeals to reason a poor antiracist tool. While the law may assume people are rational creatures, the underlying approach to law in the racial preferencing license act is that the law can only make irrational responses like racism hurt enough that people will be conditioned to reject it. In turn, African Americans will have more information to allow them to navigate a capricious, hidden system of racist actors and decisions.

These rebuttals consistently put the emphasis on empowering African Americans to function effectively in the real world instead of painting them as objects of racism who cannot do anything about the permanence of racism. The conversation between Geneva and the professor includes references to folk trickster Brer Rabbit, who uses wit and self-interest to overcome the more powerful Brer Fox. Making the connection to that folk tradition locates racial realist tactics in an African American tradition of resilience, an important rhetorical move since a powerful objection to racial realism is that it flies in the face of centuries of African American commitment to racial equality and integration.