Before reading Derrick Bell’s “Beyond Despair” text I was prepared to call his writing style risky after having read “The Chronicle of the Constitutional Contradiction”. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how serious his tone was throughout the entire text. As I was reading the text, I imagined the writer of the letter carefully choosing his words while sitting at a table. The letter writer isn’t fishing for words. He knows exactly what to say, because it is as if he is combining history, and real life experiences into the letter for Geneva. His language is easy to understand and he makes sure that the reader isn’t left stranded anywhere in the text. 

Furthermore, Derrick Bell, in a sense sounded hopeful, but not in the way that blacks would expect him to be. In fact, most blacks would find him discouraging. For instance, he stated “Armed with this knowledge, and with the enlightenment, humility based commitment that it engenders, we can accept the dilemmas of committed confrontations with evils we cannot end. We can go forth to serve, knowing that our failure to act will not change conditions and may very well worsen them,” (Bell, p. 419). As Bell would put it, racism is permanent. This isn’t something a typical black would want to hear especially if they were advocating for equality in America. Hence, the reason why Bell’s language is brutally honest. At the end of the America isn’t just going to wake up and beg for forgiveness. One can fantasize but in reality, Bell is saying that there are some circumstances which we can’t change. The only card we have to play is by raising awareness of some of the challenges we face and hope for a miracle to happen.

As I kept on reading “Beyond Despair”, one of the things that intrigued me was how often he paid homage to black slaves. The topic of slavery is like an elephant in the room that one set of people wants to acknowledge, whereas the other set wants to brush it away under the rug. He states, “I am reminded that our forebears ---though betrayed into bondage---survived the slavery in which they were reduced to things property, entitled neither to rights nor to human beings,” (Bell, p. 417). Although we have heard excerpts based on slavery, one can’t fathom what that experience was truly like. By Bell, continuously paying respect to our ancestors, it was a powerful move that resonated a feeling of gratefulness in me. Knowing that their fates were already chosen for them and that they had to in most case accept their reality. In addition, he associates blacks with the word survivor numerous times. Just thinking about the ways blacks have gotten the short end of the stick in many situations makes survival a fitting word to describe how we have adapted.
February 24, 2016



Citied WorksBell, D. (1985). Beyond Despair. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), The Derrick Bell Reader (pp.417-420). NY: New-York University Press, (2005)