Race, Rights, and Redemption : The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory

Leading legal lights weigh in on key issues of race and the law—collected in honor of one of the originators of critical race theory

“Penetrating essays on race and social stratification within policing and the law, in honor of pioneering scholar Derrick Bell.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

When Derrick Bell, one of the originators of critical race theory, turned sixty-five, his wife founded a lecture series with leading scholars, including critical race theorists, many of them Bell’s former students. Now these lectures, given over the course of twenty-five years, are collected for the first time in a volume Library Journal calls “potent” and Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, says “powerfully acknowledge[s] the persistence of structural racism.”

“To what extent does equal protection protect?” asks Ian Haney López in a penetrating analysis of the gaps that remain in our civil rights legal codes. Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, describes the hypersegregation of our cities and the limits of the law’s ability to change deep-seated attitudes about race. Patricia J. Williams explores the legacy of slavery in the law’s current constructions of sanity. Anita Allen discusses competing privacy and accountability interests in the lives of African American celebrities. Chuck Lawrence interrogates the judicial backlash against affirmative action. And Michelle Alexander describes what caused her to break ranks with the civil rights community and take up the cause of those our legal system has labeled unworthy.

Race, Rights, and Redemption (which was originally published in hardcover under the title Carving Out a Humanity) gathers some of our country’s brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium.

With contributions by:
Michelle Alexander
Anita Allen
Derrick Bell
Stephen Bright
Paul Butler
John Calmore
Devon W. Carbado
William Carter Jr.
Emma Coleman Jordan
Richard Delgado
Annette Gordon-Reed
Jasmine Gonzales Rose
Lani Guinier
Cheryl I. Harris
Ian Haney López
Sherrilyn Ifill
Charles Lawrence
Kenneth W. Mack
Mari Matsuda
Charles Ogletree
Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Theodore M. Shaw
Kendall Thomas
Patricia J. Williams
Robert A. Williams

Janet Dewart Bell is a social justice activist with a doctorate in leadership and change from Antioch University. She founded the Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society series at the New York University School of Law and is the author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement and Blackbirds Singing: Inspiring Black Women’s Speeches from the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century and the co-editor (with Vincent M. Southerland) of Carving Out a Humanity and Race, Rights, and Redemption (all published by The New Press). An award-winning television and radio producer, she lives in New York City.

Vincent M. Southerland is an assistant professor of clinical law and co–faculty director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU Law. The co-editor (with Janet Dewart Bell) of Carving Out a Humanity and Race, Rights, and Redemption (The New Press), he lives in Brooklyn, New York.