Why the Derrick Bell-Barack Obama connection matters

As conservative columnist Ben Shapiro writes today, the mainstream media seem to have decided that recently uncovered video of President Obama praising radical Harvard Professor Derrick Bell is a non-story.  But not so fast, Shapiro says -- there's plenty to take away from that brief interaction between student and professor:

The relevance is that Derrick Bell was a massive racial radical. He was the father of a fringe legal theory called the critical race theory, which states first that racial discrimination can never be eliminated; and second, that the constitutional and legal system is based on racism -- loaded with it -- and is therefore uncorrectable.

Bell was therefore significantly more militant than the traditional civil rights movement. That's why he felt that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection of the laws, benefitted whites more than blacks. That's why he thought that Brown v. Board of Education was an attempt by whites to fight back against the Soviet Union during the Cold War by undercutting the narrative that the United States was racist.

Bell thought that Louis Farrakhan was a "hero for the people," since he stood up to the white establishment -- a position so extreme that even fellow Harvard professors such as Randall Kennedy thought it was over the edge. Bell excused a certain amount of anti-Semitism by blaming it on "Jewish neoconservative racists who are undermining blacks in every way they can."

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