Books, Arts & Manners: Almost ad Nauseam

Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, by Derrick Bell (Basic, 240 pp., $20)

ONLY the lunatic fringe buys racist tracts written by whites, but black racism sells. Or so it would seem, given the growing infatuation with Malcolm X, the success of virulently anti-white rappers, and the extraordinarily warm reception already given to Derrick Bell’s new book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Bell’s basic thesis is that almost all whites are born evil (he allows a few exceptions). And almost all blacks (not the likes of Thomas Sowell) are born good. Only an irredeemably depraved race could ever have owned slaves; the once-enslaved, however, have been permanently morally elevated by their subordinate status.

About the Author

Abigail Thernstrom

Abigail Thernstrom, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is the author of Voting Rights — and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, which has just been published by the AEI Press. She is also the co-author, with Stephan Thernstrom, of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible.

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Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, by Derrick Bell (Basic, 240 pp., $20)

ONLY the lunatic fringe buys racist tracts written by whites, but black racism sells. Or so it would seem, given the growing infatuation with Malcolm X, the success of virulently anti-white rappers, and the extraordinarily warm reception already given to Derrick Bell’s new book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Bell’s basic thesis is that almost all whites are born evil (he allows a few exceptions). And almost all blacks (not the likes of Thomas Sowell) are born good. Only an irredeemably depraved race could ever have owned slaves; the once-enslaved, however, have been permanently morally elevated by their subordinate status.

About the Author

Abigail Thernstrom

Abigail Thernstrom, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is the author of Voting Rights — and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, which has just been published by the AEI Press. She is also the co-author, with Stephan Thernstrom, of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible.