I've been reading Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants. Bell was an influential figure in critical race theory (CRT), a school of thought that nowadays is associated with some of the more batshit things to show up in school lessons and workplace trainings on race and diversity. Defenders of CRT have argued that it is mischaracterized by its critics, and after reading Bell I think they are basically right. Or, at least, I think they are right to say that the idea has roots that are far more reasonable than what the critics currently point to. That's separate from whether the critics are accurate in their characterization of the various trainings currently trotted out. Since this book was published in 2004, I'm not going to use this post to examine workplace diversity trainings in 2022.
Bell's central points in this book are (1) Brown vs the Board of Education didn't accomplish anywhere near as much as was hoped (a pessimistic point, but one that he defends reasonably) and (2) white people only support progress for Black people when and to the extent that it also benefits white people. The second notion is called "Interest Convergence." I think it's basically true: Most people aren't saints, so they will pursue self-interest more than the interests of others. There's a lot to be pessimistic about in that observation, and it can lead to a pretty accurate characterization of the world as being about conflict and struggle. It's a Hobbesian notion about the state of nature.
At the same time, there's a way to view interest convergence more positively: Improvement for disadvantaged groups happens when people see a common good. This is not so different from Hobbes' notion that we can escape a state of nature via a commonwealth.
I don't know enough about CRT, or at least pre-2020 CRT outside of various trainings, to say if other theorists mostly think in terms of common good or conflict, but Bell is clearly a pessimist, and for understandable reasons.
Bell's value judgments are largely unassailable in the way that value judgments tend to be, because they are rooted in premises that you either accept or don't, or accept in some situations. Where I take issue with him is in the later chapters, where he dances around the idea that Black students tend to need different educational models than white students. To the extent that he's explicit about different needs, it's largely focused on pride and role models, and I think those points are pretty unassailable. But he keeps hinting that there's more, and that's a common feature of progressive educational commentary. Needless to say, I fundamentally disagree with him there, and wish he didn't go down that road, because it detracts from his more valid analyses.
