Ref - 3/8/12

One could look at the video and see an idealistic law student supporting a professor he understandably identifies with because they are both blacks in the legal community.  As a lawyer, I can tell you that there are very few blacks in the legal community now and were significantly fewer in 1991.  It is genuinely harder to live day-to-day in law school if you are black.  There are social and professional dynamics at play that make life harder, dynamics which are probably magnified because the social pool is full of hyper-ambitious sharks.  These ambitious ones may support racial diversity in both word and thought, but when faced with the decision of who to socialize with or partner with in study groups, a white law student is primarily factoring his or her professional future into the equation, and that usually leaves the black kid out.  It's all about rank in law school, race be damned.  Unfortunately, this view ignores the reality that Obama was taking sides within the black legal community, siding with the radical racialist view and abandoning the rational one. 

Derrick Bell harshly attacked a fellow black professor at Harvard, a man named Randall Kennedy, before Obama spoke on his behalf.  Bell attacked Kennedy for questioning the radical racial assumptions academics like Bell adopt, such as the assumption that whites are inherently racist and incapable of genuine good will toward blacks, that whites will only treat blacks equally if their own self-interest is benefitted.  Obama did nothing to defend Kennedy, but apparently took sides with Bell, the crusading racial leftist.  Kennedy is no conservative, or what some racialists might term an "uncle Tom," by the way.  He has written three books on race and the law.  He just didn't adopt the most radical racial assumptions out there, which apparently Barack Obama did.

One might assume that an idealistic young law student understandably sides with an academic who puts diversity of thought as his top priority and fights for it. Again, unfortunately, Bell was fighting to make the already liberal academic establishment more radically left, not more diverse. This fact is underscored by Bell's later firing from the Oregon law school.  His view of diversity required hiring only leftist black professors, and even the liberal law school at Oregon could not go along with this.  Obama apparently thought that academia needed to be more liberal.  If liberal academia was not liberal enough for Obama, he must have been pretty far to the left. 

One inclined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt might assume that because all of this happened when he was a kid over twenty years ago, it's irrelevant.  This take ignores the fact that Obama was an adult leading the most respected law review in the nation.  A person in this position should be held accountable for his or her positions.  Students in law schools are held to extremely high academic standards and are expected to defend their positions.  Obama knew what he was doing.  The fact that this was twenty years ago is also negated by the fact that Obama continued to have a relationship with Bell until he died last year. 

Whether one views this video as innocuous or like a red flag will be based on the assumptions he or she brings to viewing it.  It seems that Breitbart may have thought that throwing this Rorschach test out there represented the best course for starting this vetting process.  It draws out the journalists who will be willing to at least listen to an honest vetting of Obama and those who are steadfastly against any vetting.  Knowing who these people are will be useful.

Obama-Bell Video

Thomas Sowell on Derrick Bell

Prof. Randall L. Kennedy Giving Some Credit to Whites on Racial Progress, Something Bell Disagreed With