The groundbreaking, "eerily prophetic, almost haunting"
work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice (Michelle
Alexander, author of The New Jim
Crow).
In Faces at the
Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar
Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example—including the
classic story "The Space Traders"—to argue that racism is
an integral and permanent part of American society. African American
struggles for equality are doomed to fail, he writes, so long as the
majority of whites do not see their own well-being threatened by the
status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this
unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress.
Only then will blacks, and those whites who join with them, be in a
position to create viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of
racism.
Now with a new
foreword by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow,
this classic book was a pioneering contribution to critical race
theory scholarship, and it remains urgent and essential reading on
the problem of racism in America.