Permanent racism: Derrick Bell’s racial realism

Chapter 3 explores the concept of ‘permanent racism’ by returning to the work of Derrick Bell, founder of Critical Race Theory. His idea of the permanence of racism is troubling, at odds with Britain’s contemporary postracial turn. CRT’s defining quality is its stark rejection of liberal models of race equality. This chapter traces CRT’s emergence from US critical legal studies, and its revisionist critique of civil rights policy. Examining these origins enables effective understanding of CRT concepts such as ‘interest convergence’, ‘contradiction closure’, ‘colourblindness’ and the critically important stabilising role of racism. Chapter 3 also discusses Bell’s satire ‘The Space Traders’, which narrativises Bell’s social analysis. Bell’s ideas are compared with those of US peers, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and also with British scholars such as Stuart Hall and Mark Fisher, whose ideas about capitalist realism have under-discussed parallels with Bell’s ‘racial realism’. Chapter 3 traces CRT’s development across fields, through offshoots such as LatCrit and QueerCrit, and its international influence: in particular its growth in Britain, which has been contested but has been important in contemporary Black and antiracist thought. This chapter establishes CRT as a framework for examining Britain’s postracial turn.