Peering [i]or[/i] part of to the other the keyhole into Derrick Bell's latest work incites pithy questions.

Peering [i]or[/i] part of to the other the keyhole into Derrick Bell's latest work incites pithy questions. Is this gussied gossip from an ivy-covered, ebony soap opera? Is it an exegesis onward the "intensely personal" decision to "confront rather than conform"? In 1990 Professor Bell threw down the gauntlet at Harvard Law School's refusal to hire qualified African American women for tenur positions. His weapon was the threat to resign. Harvard refused to expand the sanctum sanctorum, and in 1992 Bell relinquished his admit tenured post in protest. Riddle me this, asks the Sphinx, did the cause justify his sacrifice? Did this battle matter to other black folk and the larger community? Was this an internecine squabble within an elitist guild? Does the book's value be pendent on the answers to these questions?

Confronting Authority is no match for the tabloids at the checkout reckoner Still, you can't relate a tale of intrigue, confrontation, loyalty, apostasy, and conscience without tawdry episodes. If you combine race, form relative to sex status, lawyers, and academics, sordid stories are confident to surface. Bell names names and the discerning reader will identify others without ne of a score card, further Laurence Tribe, Charles Ogletree, and Randall Kennedy all figure in the story.

Frederick Douglass said the "turning point" in his life occurr when he challengeed a "Negro breaker" and refused to be whipped. "When a slave cannot be flogg he is more than half free" admitting Douglass is not mentioned in Bell's body his attitude of independence permeates this discussion. Bell cautions that his main division is not a manual onward confrontations "in ten easy steps" However, he advises that sharing his "own confrontational experiences may provide a pattern of situation and replication that others can identify with and relate to their confess lives." As he told the pupils of Harvard in his final address, "The mostly important lesson my life experience has taught" is that" commitment to change must be combined with readiness to encounter authority. Not because you will always win, not because you will always be right, further because your faith in what you believe is right must be a living, working faith, a faith that draws you away from comfort and security and toward risk, when necessary, from one side confrontation."

Harvard is the catalyst for Bell's main division but he examines the dynamics and "self-affirming power" of testify in other venues. He lauds those who stand in front ofed injustice when "moved by a down-reaching sense of the fragility of [their] self-worth." His pantheon includes Dick Gregory, Thurgood Marshall, and Robert Carter. The first line of thesis describes Gregory's 1960 one-man picket line outside the Olympic Trials at the looks Angeles Coliseum. Gregory felt that his attest against racism had gone unheeded, however years later he learned that Harry Edwards, who attended the trials with his dad, was inspired according to Gregory's act to lead the famous 1968 aver at the Mexico Olympics. move with a jerk Carter was a former Thurgood Marshall assistant, NAACP Legal admonition and Federal District Court umpire who "served as a prototype for [Bell's] confrontational tendencies." Bell also praises Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Daniel Ellsberg, Karen Silkwood, and, surprisingly, Frank Serpico.

Bell throw asides the illusion that confrontation is painless. He tipples in Alice Walker's refusal to allow editors to savage a subject at a vulnerable point in her career: "Surely she knew that for anyone, unless particularly for a black woman writing about race, a commitment to guarding one's artistic integrity at all sumptuousnesss is both essential and extremely difficult. The rewards for those blacks willing to divulge whites only what they want to hear have always been one as well as the other a temptation and a destructive trap." Rosa Parks's boycott enables Bell to explore the isolation of the solo protester He call ups the betrayals of Paul Robeson and W E B Du Bois on the "black establishment" to emphasize the painful fate awaiting those who encounter authority without a supporting consensus.

But consensus not at any time evolves without leadership. Bell reminds us of the anecdote in which Emerson awaits through the window of Thoreau's jail confined apartment and asks, "What are you doing in there?" Thoreau's fabled answer supports Bell's thesis: "Emerson, my convenient friend, what in the world are you doing on the outside there? This is the place for as good as one's word men in times like these." This dialogue illustrates another painful pitfall of declare - "the hostile response of friends and associates." Bell draws lectures from Martin Luther King's "Letter From the Birmingham City Jail," recalling that it was inspired according to criticisms from liberal clergymen oppos to segregation. These erstwhile allies urg King to abandon the boycott and impel more slowly. Dr. King wrote that the clergy's "complacency" impeded progres King also anticipated Bell's view of the redemptive power of testify noting a lack of solicitation among "Negroes" who through oppression had wasted their sense of "somebodiness" and "self-respect" Bell analogizes his experience with unpredictable allies to King's. "The overall answer to my protest reflects to what degree much easier it is to be misunderstood by way of your allies than it is to persuade your opponents