And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice

Harvard's first black tenured law professor combines fiction with fact to dramatize continuing racial injustices in the United States.

A distinguished legal scholar and civil rights activist employs a series of dramatic fables and dialogues to probe the foundations of America’s racial attitudes and raise disturbing questions about th

Publishers Weekly

In this expansion of a foreword to a 1985 issue of the Harvard Law Review on the Supreme Court, Harvard Law School professor Bell (Race, Racism and American Law, etc.) asserts that although racial equality has been legally affirmed, economic equality after initial gains is retrogressing despite affirmative action. Lack of enforcement of legislation is partly to blame, he maintains, as are problems concerned as much with social class as color, notably self-interest of a dominant white society. Discussing unresolved racial contradictions of the Constitution, still largely responsible, in Bell's view, for racist attitudes, he uses ingenious metaphorical tales to illustrate aspects of racial injustice that still obtain. He charges that whites have benefited more than blacks from civil-rights reforms, citing desegregation of schools and the 14th Amendment and other measures that extend constitutional coverage to all citizens. He suggests the formation of a coalition of disadvantaged blacks and whites, urging that entitlement standards include class as well as racial disadvantage. (September 17)

Derrick Bell is professor of law at the Harvard Law School.