Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Critical Race Theory

An important context for Faces at the Bottom of the Well is critical race theory (CRT), a school of legal scholarship focused on how institutions and systems reproduce outcomes that advantage white people and disadvantage people of color. It has gained increasing attention in contemporary American political culture as the target of activists who believe culturally sensitive education in K-12 educational systems is a form of CRT. At its heart, however, CRT is a critique of the law and legal education. Although there is a long history of African American critiques of the US legal system, this school of thought emerged in the 1970s as scholars like Bell began to systematically use a racial lens to examine the law and other fields. In the next decade, civil rights scholar and law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw identified race as central lens rather than incidental in understanding the law in the United States.

CRT is based on several core premises about race in America. First, race is not a natural thing. It is a made thing (social construct) that emerges from the way we think about the significance of things like skin color in a social context, and we can understand its workings by looking at the impact it has on real-world outcomes, such as health and economic disparities between white people and people of color, and by listening to what people of color have to say about their experiences with racism. Bell drives home this premise in most of the pieces in the book, with Chapter 8: “Racism’s Secret Bonding” showing that it would take an unimaginable technology for white people to overcome the social construction of race and do something about racism.

Second, racism is a central element of the United States—not a departure from its founding principles—and serves the interests of white people; these interests are social, political, economic, and psychological. The upshot of its centrality is that apparent progress like civil rights legislation will always, in some way, serve the interests of white people. Such signs of progress will disappear as soon as they do not serve those interests, especially if they damage the psychological benefit white people derive from being a dominant group that subordinates a subordinate racial group. Certain groups (African American women, for example) will deal with multiple, overlapping forms of oppression that amplify the impact of racism or sexism. This reality is at the heart of Chapter 9: “The Space Traders,” in which Bell uses speculative fiction to lay bare how deeply ingrained this self-interest is.

Third, the law is neither colorblind nor objective. One can indirectly see the influence of race by looking at how, over the span of the country’s history, the law has helped to perpetuate outcomes that disadvantage African Americans. The challenge of exposing the influence of race in our legal system is that traditionally people see the law as impartial and objective in principle, a point Bell makes in Chapter 3: “The Racial Preference Licensing Act” and Chapter 7: “A Law Professor’s Protest.” Paying attention to outcomes in the real world and paying attention to how they correlate with race would require admitting that impartiality and objectivity are not in fact central to law. Many people, especially those engaged with the law, revolt against such an admission.

The centering of white interests even in the supposedly objective realm of the law means that, especially in legal scholarship, it is important to incorporate the voices of ordinary people living out the reality of racism; storytelling is thus an important tool for legal scholars looking to include such voices. The pieces in Faces at the Bottom of the Well are all devoted to using stories to explore each of these three premises to a greater or lesser extent.

Storytelling as a Tool for Understanding Race in America

Faces at the Bottom of the Well is a prime example of how storytelling can be used to examine the puzzling persistence of racism despite convulsions of action against it, such as the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In each of the pieces in the collection, Bell uses storytelling to illuminate some underexamined aspect of race in the United States.

In Chapter 1: “Racial Symbols: A Limited Legacy,” Bell takes care to represent not only traditional legal perspectives on the meaning of racial symbols resulting from legal victories but also to show that, for ordinary African Americans, these victories may not always translate to improvements in day-to-day life. The dialogue between the law professor and Jesse Semple and the fact that the driver gets the last word show that Bell values that voice as an important part of how we think about racial progress. Storytelling in this case emerges from these multiple African American voices and the differences between them.

In other instances, Bell eschews efforts to write in the voices of ordinary African Americans by using very slight storytelling frames to hold together arguments and discussions that are focused on issues that may be important to legal scholars but less important to ordinary readers. Chapter 3: “The Racial Preference Licensing Act” and Chapter 6: “The Rules of Racial Standing” are two pieces that have almost no narrative, with both being almost entirely exposition on the influence of some aspect of the law that is shaped by race and racism. They include 31 numeric citations each. Most of the text is consumed with Socratic dialogues (questions, answers, and attacks on the consistency of the professor’s beliefs) that Geneva uses to help the professor understand the implications of the story that precedes the dialogue. These conversations are technically fiction since they are created conversations between a persona of Bell’s and a fictional character, but they lack narrative elements, such as plot.

Chapter 7: “A Law Professor’s Protest” is framed by a story, but nine of the 23 pages of the piece are devoted to the story with the rest devoted to a dialogue on what the story says about the state of legal education in the United States. Bell notes in the preface that many of the pieces in the book were texts he wrote to facilitate teaching in his law classes, and the focus on critiquing legal education makes it clear the imagined audience for these pieces is not the general reader but rather people versed in the law (or least being versed in the law as students).

In some pieces, there are strong storytelling elements, and the dialogues are kept to a minimum or are absent. On one end of the spectrum of this type is Chapter 2: “The Afroatlantica Awakening,” an allegory that is free of individual characters and instead focuses on getting the reader up to speed on how the US has thought about the place of African Americans in America. It is heavy on references to thinkers on the matter of race with large block quotes like the one from Frederick Douglass (49) and many footnotes. These quotes and footnotes are conventions of scholarly work and teaching texts, and they make the didactic (teaching) purpose of this piece clear. Storytelling is used to force the reader to speculate on the impossibility of Black nationalism and what that means for people seeking other ways to help America escape the predicament of race. The lesson seems to be that acceptance that racism is permanent is the first step for all Americans.

Other pieces lack such quotes and scholarly bits, as is the case with Chapter 4: “The Last Black Hero.” This one is a short story that forces the reader to examine their assumptions about the meaning of cross-racial romances. There is almost no discussion of legal theories and the law, and it has exactly one reference (a lyric to a Tina Turner song). It is clear the imagined reader is an ordinary person who may be wondering if love is the answer to racism (the story implies that it is not).

Bell uses an objective, third-person narrator to expose common attitudes toward race and gender that these characters, recognizable types in African American culture, hold. While there is no explicit connection to legal theories, the piece reveals that even in our most intimate places we are subject to the workings of race and racism. Storytelling about relationships instead of a straightforward expository piece on love and race allows Bell to show the real psychological harms of race in people’s personal lives.

The culminating piece of storytelling in the book is Chapter 9: “The Space Traders.” It has two footnotes with the other texts incorporated as brief quotes or unobtrusive numeric references. There is no risk that it will be seen as a lightly fictionalized legal commentary as a result. Coming in at a hefty 44 pages, it is more a novella (short novel) than a story. It is speculative fiction in that it asks us to take what we know about race and the law and to think through a what-if scenario in which America sees a way out of paying the cost of its racism.

This story includes several literary elements. It includes the most sustained character development, though it is still clear that some characters like Gleason Golightly and Reverend Jasper are archetypes for participants in American political culture around race (their names alone are clues that they are archetypes). Bell name checks many important African American figures in American politics and scholarship on race, incorporates commentary on the law indirectly by mentioning the Supreme Court’s fictional actions, and dramatizes the political or philosophical underpinnings of each group’s approach to race and racism.

Still, out of all the pieces in Faces at the Bottom of the Well, this one most evokes emotion, especially the closing scene when African Americans board the airships. Through historical allusions to the Middle Passage and the slave trade, Bell uses the story to press home the danger in ignoring racism’s permanence. He is well aware of the emotions provoked by this ending for many readers, as indicated by his choice to close the volume with an epilogue with the title “Beyond Despair.” Where in Chapter 8: “Racism’s Secret Bonding” Bell uses speculative fiction and a dialogue to talk about what racism feels like, in “The Space Traders,” emotions, many of them negative ones, take center stage.

The pieces in Faces at the Bottom of the Well are on a spectrum in terms of how Bell uses storytelling. The fact that he takes care to use some storytelling, if only in the frames for individual pieces, shows his commitment to legal storytelling as a valid approach to helping readers understand race.

The Importance of Acceptance and Defiance

Bell’s central thesis is that racism is permanent. Most people who will take the time to read a book like Faces at the Bottom of the Well are likely to be well-intentioned people who want to learn more about racism in the law and society. They may be law students interested in working through the what-ifs Bell writes, especially since he is no longer alive to teach about this important approach to the law.

For such an audience, Bell’s thesis is a hard sell, and his representation of traditional groups who agitate for advancements in civil rights is likely to be off-putting to people who see themselves in these groups. Bell has a rhetorical problem, in other words: how can he build common ground with people committed to civil rights when his aim seems to be to argue that their efforts are likely to fail? Bell taps into several philosophical attitudes to make the case for such readers that they should persist in their efforts anyway.

Bell’s work encourages a clear-eyed look at the reality we are living in, one rooted in acknowledgement that there are some things we can control, and there are some things we cannot. For the part of life that we can control, we should exert ourselves to make changes as we are able. Most of the pieces in Faces at the Bottom of the Well are devoted to sorting out what is in our control and what is not when it comes to matters of race. In Chapter 2: “The Afroatlantica Awakening,” having an actual African American homeland is not in the control of African Americans who join the armada, but sustaining the community they’ve built is, and its possibility changes them for the better. Chapter 3: “The Racial Preference Licensing Act" is premised on acceptance of racism as a permanent feature, and the dialogue after it encourages the reader to consider the benefit in having racism plainly laid out. Chapter 4: “The Last Black Hero” exposes the importance of accepting how race forms and deforms people’s interior lives and how to think strategically about it, as Neva Brownlee does.

In Chapter 5: “Divining a Racial Realism Theory,” Erika Weschler accepts the role her racial privilege gives her and the logical end of racist laws to prepare herself to act. Chapter 6: “The Rules of Racial Standing” encourages African Americans to acknowledge the way race shapes their ability to be heard and to use that knowledge to read the rhetorical situation more effectively when they speak. Chapter 7: “The Law Professor’s Protest” asks the reader to face up to the failure of affirmative action policies so far while Chapter 8: “Racism’s Secret Bonding” adds more light to the reason that educational efforts fail (they lack data storm technology). Chapter 9: “The Space Traders,” with its satirizing of almost every mainstream approach to dealing with race in America, helps the reader to see that, in the worst-case scenario, racial politics as usual will likely fail to protect African Americans from white self-interest, which is something African Americans cannot control or even consistently manipulate, as the fate of Gleason Golightly shows.

After reading something like “The Space Traders,” readers would be forgiven if they retreated into apathy or despair, two states of mind that are likely to lead to inaction. Bell counters this tendency by insisting that throughout American history, and most particularly African American history, there is a longstanding commitment to defiance as an intrinsically good response after accepting the likelihood of failure. He introduces this theme in the preface with the example of Mrs. Biona MacDonald, who “avoided discouragement and defeat because at the point that she determined to resist her oppression, she was triumphant” (xxv) even when she knew she could in no way end racism on her own. This attitude makes her and others like her “heroic” (xxiv). She is an ordinary person, and her example provides a figure with whom readers can identify. Other figures are also there as examples of persistence despite apparent failure, including historical figures like Jessie Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bell ends the book by explicitly addressing what to do about the potential for despair. He casts African Americans’ time in America as an ongoing and brave struggle to make a life that transcends what racism says they can be. That tradition of defiance—not optimistic and idealistic perspectives about ending racism—is the basis for how best to respond to racism. He offers that just surviving slavery alone would have been an act of heroism accomplished by millions, who lived on as “complete, defiant, though horribly scarred beings” (247). His answer to how to move beyond survival is “service” (247), which requires action on the part of readers once they reach the acceptance stage about racism in America. Here and throughout, he references African American spirituals as a storehouse for this attitude of persistence and defiance. Song lines like “I want to be in that number” (249) show that creative responses like making up songs—or even using legal storytelling to tell the truth about racism—are evidence of a tradition of resilience that modern readers would do well to emulate.