The Lies of Soledad O'Brien

I'm not convinced that Soledad O'Brien is ignorant of critical race theory and that perhaps production assistants were reading Wikipedia into her earpiece. But there's no doubt that she's aggressively lying about the genuine ideological program of critical race theorists. I read "Faces at the Bottom of the Well" years ago. The book's a collection of Bell's essays and it lays out the thesis that the civil rights movement was basically a sham allowing whites to claim race progress while continuing the subjugation of blacks. The theory argues that the law is an institutional structure of the racist state. The giveaway is how hard O'Brien attempts to smack down Joel Pollak. And she does appear to stumble when defining the theory. It looks like a canned response. But she was an acolyte of Bell, so the actual degree of knowledge is less important than her program of artifice. It's really, really reprehensible.

The folks at Breitbart.com are all over this. Most closely related to the point I'm raising is Dan Riehl's essay, "Derrick Bell: Liberal Whites Are Oppressors."

But check Jeff Goldstein, who brings the heat, "“The Vetting: CNN Implodes Over Breitbart’s Obama/Bell Video”":

We don’t need to apologize for vetting Barack Obama. We don’t need to let Soledad O’Brien try to redefine and neuter critical race theory and dissemble about what its aims were. We don’t need to fear smirking innuendo that, because we have actually read and understood what “theorists” like Professor Bell advocate, we are somehow pasty racist pussies afeared of the revenge of Mandigo.

We are allowed to reject those premises — and rather than take the easy way out and try to avoid being put into positions where thinly-veiled accusations of racism are levied against us (we’re still being counseled to watch what we say, so as not to draw the attentions of those whose very goal it is to comb our political speech for snippets they can remove from context and use to create false narratives about what we believe, which they pin back on us) — we need to make our political opponents express their indictments directly, and then beat them back forcefully until they come to understand that the ease with which they launch these smears has the consequence that the public recognizes just how cynical and disingenuous and ideologically motivated they are.

In any case, check Breitbart's homepage for all the updates. Here's this, for example, "Obama Assigned Reading: Bell Says Whites Might Enslave Blacks."

BONUS: "Obama Assigned Bell at University of Chicago Law School."