Derrick Bell on the Civil War
Interest Convergence Applied
I just had a true “laugh out loud” moment.
I don’t consider myself a neo-confederate. But I do reject the popular, mainstream media version of the “Civil War” that we hear so often. You know - everyone in the South hated blacks, and Lincoln and the North loved blacks so much that they were willing to sacrifice their lives for them in a bloody “Civil War.”
If you just read Lincoln’s own words, you’ll see that wasn’t the case.
And then I have these race hustlers who want to argue, as CRT does, that this country has been fueled by racism since day one. Racism can explain everything. But many of them will also argue for the popular version of the war. And so I have wondered over the years…when is their everything-is-fueled-by-racism lens going to catch up with their interpretation of the war?
Let’s put it another way.
One of the key concepts of the late Derrick Bell, considered by many to be the father of CRT, is the theory of interest convergence. In short, it theorizes that “the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites.”1
For example, in Brown v. Board of Education, Bell argued that it “cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”2
In Critical Race Theory, racism is always assumed. Always. Even at times when you think whites have had a moment of clarity and charity, you’d be wrong. A major motivating factor for many (most?) whites is not to advance black equality but their own self-interests.
If this theory is true, wouldn’t this apply to the “Civil War” as well? Sure seems like it would. And then I read this today, [emphasis mine]
... We didn’t learn in school that Lincoln [freed the slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation] only after all alternatives to action were gone.... The Civil War was begun to preserve the Union, not end slavery, and when Lincoln issued the Proclamation, it liberated only those slaves held “... within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States....” The order could have no legal effect in areas not then under control of the Union forces, and it specifically excluded slaveholding areas in Virginia and West Virginia which had not joined the rebellion.
You can probably guess where this is going. Is this a quote from neo-confederate propaganda? Nope. It’s from Derrick Bell’s Black Faith in a Racist Land.
Yes. I truly did laugh out loud.
How long will it take for these CRT allies and Lincoln lovers to catch up with something Bell and “neo-confederate” Thomas J. DiLorenzo have been saying for quite some time?
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Since I’m on this topic, I might as well include some bonus content from the late black civil rights leader and MLK’s right-hand man, Ralph David Abernathy:
Contrary to what I had always assumed, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, had been a racist society since before the Civil War. As a number of historians have pointed out, the Black Codes instituted in the Middle West in the early nineteenth century were designed to keep blacks from entering the state and settling there. Indeed some people argue that the so-called “Free Soil Movement,” which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western states, was based not so much on a love of liberty as on a hatred of blacks and a desire to keep them out of their part of the country.
Indeed Lincoln’s own attitude was by no means pure or enlightened by modern standards. While opposing slavery, he spoke out against social and political equality, denied that he wanted to give blacks the vote, said that the two races could not live on the North American continent in harmony, and suggested that the best solution to the race problem was to ship blacks back to Africa. His Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the five Union states where the “peculiar institution” was still legal in 1863; it didn’t even free them in those parts of the South then occupied by federal troops.
That historical legacy had left Illinois with what many northerners would regard as the best of two possible worlds: a segregated society without the stigma of Jim Crow laws. How well such a society has functioned over the years can be measured by the number of major race riots in the City of Chicago since the turn of the century. No area, North or South, has produced so many. With the exception of the New York City draft riots of 1864, the Chicago uprisings may have produced the highest number of fatalities for such brief and violent confrontations. In Alabama and Mississippi the lynchings and murders were perennial, an ever-present possibility in even the smallest communities. Over the years they added up to more racial murders than occurred in the state of Illinois, but they were spread out and were therefore less spectacular. In Chicago all the hatred and frustration would build up over a long period and then explode from time to time in an orgy of mass violence and bloodletting that made headlines all over the country.
The last such explosion had occurred in the forties. In 1965 it appeared as if the time were ripe for another. It was into that world that we stepped when we got off the plane at O’Hare Airport, ready to take on the City of Chicago.3
Brown V. Board Of Education And The Interest-Convergence Dilemma, Derrick A. Bell
ibid.
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography, Ralph David Abernathy