Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Preface-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface Summary

Derrick Bell reminds the reader that Geneva Crenshaw is a fictional figure he uses in previous work to create a more flexible approach to critiquing the effectiveness of legal precedent in addressing the failure of the law to counter racism. Racism is a permanent part of American law and society, but philosophers, activists, and ordinary citizens have given Bell hope that continued resistance despite this permanence is the best antidote for despair. Bell notes that many of the pieces in the book were teaching texts he used as a law professor and thanks those who helped him transform these texts into readable stories.

Introduction Summary: “Divining Our Racial Themes”

Bell provides a legal and philosophical approach to understanding the stories that follow. During his lifetime, people like him went from shame during childhood about enslaved ancestors to being more interested in that history during the 1960s. Diverse audiences came to understand that slavery existed but failed to understand that its ongoing aftermath required action in the present. White Americans grudgingly accepted that the most blatantly racist laws had to go after civil rights protesters forcefully made that point.

These changes notwithstanding, African Americans’ lives still show all the impacts of a racist legal structure that is just as harmful to freedom as the South African system of apartheid. The ill effects of the lack of opportunity and employment that stem from this inequality include a lack of self-worth, drug dependence, and broken families. Most white people are not willing to do anything about the effects because they fear loss of their own racial privilege. They extend ineffectual sympathy or blame African Americans for the effects of racism (with African American conservatives supporting them in this belief).

We had a civil rights movement that did away with the most blatant forms of discrimination, but contemporary observers of race now need to ask just what in this past can serve as a guide in the future. Racism today is more insidious: lack of racial representation in many arenas emerges from the cumulative effects of seemingly individual racial preferences, tokenism, and the refusal of white people to address economic inequality that affects everyone.

This inequality only persists because even disadvantaged white people prioritize their racial bonds with white elites over their potential bonds with disadvantaged African Americans. As a result, African Americans must understand that their rights and interests are at any time subject to loss as soon as white people believe that extending these rights will inconvenience white people. This truth means racial progress is never permanent; every gain will be followed by setbacks.

This cycle exists, Bell concludes because racism is baked into the American legal system, starting with the founding of the nation on the basis of genocide and slavery, an ugly history in which white Americans have somehow cast themselves as the heroes. The lesson African Americans should take from their ancestors is that survival and defiance of this early history are heroic. Bell’s stories are designed to reveal the myths that cloud the reality of the permanence of racism.

Chapter 1 Summary: “Racial Symbols: A Limited Legacy”

A law professor makes his way to one of several lectures he is giving to help mark the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, a January event that leads to many more speaking opportunities for people like him. The professor has in hand the latest stories of Geneva Crenshaw. He is pleasantly surprised when his driver is an African American man. The driver’s name is Jesse B. Semple, just like the character from Langston Hughes’s stories in which the African American everyman character commented on matters of race. The driver, much like his namesake, has plenty to say about contemporary race, culture, and politics.

During their ride to the college, the two men spar over whether African American firsts and holidays like Martin Luther King day are signs of true progress. While the professor sees such strides as signs of true progress, Semple sees them as worthless tokens white people give to African Americans. The professor is forced to admit that this insight reminds him of his misgivings as he realized his work on school integration cases didn’t much improve the education of the children of his African American clients. Still, symbols are important to both white and African Americans’ sense that there has been some progress on issues of race.

Semple dismisses these people as unrealistic. Clarence Thomas, an African American man who made it to the Supreme Court, is surely a symbol that African Americans can be on the highest court in the land, but his conservative legal thinking is just as right-wing as his white peers. Semple condemns African American elites like the professor as being out of touch. Semple argues that the real truth about the modern African American experience is coming from rappers. In other cases, symbols of Black political success like David Dinkins (the first African American mayor of New York) only get power when cities are too wrecked to be improved. The professor agrees, but he points out that previous administrations that stripped cities of resources are to blame. The professor admits that it is depressing so many African American symbols of success and change are hollow. They can’t be good symbols of African American success.

The professor concedes that there is a disconnect between the few African Americans who achieve conventional success and ordinary African Americans, but it isn’t their fault. Their success, no matter how hard-won, becomes evidence for white people that any person who works hard can succeed. Semple does give Martin Luther King, Jr., some credit for having answered the call of ordinary African Americans by fighting for African American rights. White people and African American middle-class people only respected him as a symbol, however, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jesse Jackson shows the limit to who gets to be a symbol of African American success. People accepted him as a source of Black self-love right up to the moment he decided to run for president. Semple says he would vote for Jackson in a heartbeat because Jackson has an unabashed love of Black people and speaks truth to powerful white people. His defiance and fearlessness, even if they result in failure, distinguish him from the mass of people.

As they near the college where the professor will speak, Semple does reveal one symbol he longs for—a real Black homeland. He envies the Bajans he sees running their own country every time he visits his wife’s family in Barbados. The piece closes with Semple singing a verse from the African American spiritual “I Am a Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow,” a hymn about a rootless wanderer with only heaven for a home.

Preface-Chapter 1 Analysis

There are multiple personas in these first three sections of the book, and each persona allows Bell to develop his central argument in different ways.

The persona in the preface is Bell himself. The function of a preface is to provide context for the work that follows, and here we are able to see Bell deploying several tools to get his points across to multiple audiences. Bell explicitly states that using fictional genres seems an odd choice for a legal scholar, but it is one that lets him tell some truth to general readers that he cannot do with the usual legal language. He quotes a series of influences—progressive educator Paulo Freire; philosopher Albert Camus; anti-colonialist philosopher Franz Fanon; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and the fierce but quite ordinary Mrs. McDonald, an African American parent who fought for desegregation despite the seeming impossibility of overcoming racism.

The choices here show off his intellect and establish his credibility despite the seemingly odd approach to his topic. His listing of Mrs. MacDonald alongside these historical and intellectual heavyweights anticipates his focus throughout the book on finding equal wisdom in the lived experience of ordinary African Americans. The persona in the preface also shows a willingness to credit others—editors, students, many women, and administrative staff—in helping him to create his book. This move reinforces his emphasis on collective wisdom as a source of strength for the work of thinking through modern reality.

Although the introduction includes this same authorial voice, he relies upon some of the same rhetorical moves he uses later in the text to reveal the themes of the text to follow. He opens with an autobiographical account of his changing relationship to his enslaved ancestors. Alongside this more personal evidence are references to important African American historians like Orlando Patterson, writers like Toni Morrison, and the many African American women academics whose work shapes his understanding of race.

All these sources are used to preview the most stunning part of his argument: We will never be rid of racism because it is so central to the American system. While it is almost a statement of faith for white progressives and African American activists that work toward equality can succeed, Bell calls this belief a simple unwillingness to face facts. Far from being a reason for despair, this revelation should push people to stiffen their resolves and aim for defiance. The stories and pieces that follow, he claims, will help readers to accept his thesis and claims. By promising to use his chapters to undercut our racial assumptions, Bell assumes an important persona, that of the truthteller, no matter the cost, placing himself in a long line of African American truthtellers like King, who told the truth even when it resulted in death.

By the time the reader gets to Chapter 1, the preface and introduction have prepared them to hear some provocative statements about race, and Bell both meets and counters that expectation in multiple ways. The premise of this piece—a Socratic dialogue between an elite African American professor and a sharp-witted limo driver—is one that counters the stereotype that dense discussions of race happen only in university halls. Bell instead conjures an alternate, public place like the back of a limo as a space where real discussions of race can occur.

Much like the barbershops where such talk regularly takes place in African American communities, this arena is one in which being an academic isn’t an automatic source of authority. Jesse B. Semple, the African American driver, has a car loaded with texts from important African American figures, quotes from African American poets and writers memorized, and a sophisticated understanding of modern American politics—so much so that he successfully refutes the African American law professor’s arguments time and again.

Not only has Semple mastered this intellectual tradition of discourse around race, but he also has ready access to pop culture, like rap, and traditional African American culture, like the spiritual he hums at the end. In short, Bell’s point in having much of the authority be in the hands of Semple neatly illustrates his contention in the introduction that there is something to be learned from the lives of ordinary African Americans about how to confront race in America. These lessons are not all just in the past either as Semple’s strong arguments and the example of the truth in Hip-Hop make clear.

The reversal of a common hierarchy when it comes to who gets to speak for subordinated people—intellectuals and elites over ordinary people—shows Bell’s commitment to rejecting past models for understanding race and America’s racial predicament. Answers won’t necessarily come from the Talented Tenth (DuBois’s name for the one-tenth of African American society that managed to use their intellect and skills to attain an education and some small power) or men like the African American law professor in this dialogue.

How readers see this wide-ranging conversation depends on how familiar the reader is with discourse around race in African American communities. The idea of an African American driver holding his own and successfully countering a professor’s argument may seem fantastical or even absurd for outsiders to these communities. For insiders, this kind of talk is part of the air. Bell highlights this split in perception by mentioning figures like King and Jesse Jackson, whose reputations inside and outside African American communities are in stark contrast (and this includes contrasts between the perspectives of African American working-class people and middle-class African Americans ).

The upshot of these writer’s choices at the start of this volume is that readers’ notions about legitimate sources of knowledge about race are upended. Finally, Bell also previews the themes of the story that follows by introducing longing for a Black homeland at the end of the piece.