http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/03/07/Sowell%20On%20Bell
Was Derrick Bell a radical when Barack Obama told us all to open our hearts and minds? Thomas Sowell was asked about Bell at the time. Here’s what he said:
SOWELL: Oh, political purposes. I just a couple of days ago was told by someone from Wellesley that there’s a divestment campaign at Wellesley, demonstrations, the whole thing, and that those black girls who did not want to participate in that were threatened with violence — and that’s not unique. At Stanford the Hispanic students, some Hispanic students, have complained that the Hispanic establishment has threatened them if they don’t want to go along with what’s being said and done, and they claim that only 15% of the Hispanic students at Stanford have ever attended a single event sponsored by the Hispanic establishment, which speaks boldly in their name. Ah, and so you have this kind of thing going on at these schools across the country. Again, notice, that once, once you let in the students who cannot make, meet the academic standards, you’re going to end up having to let in professors who can’t meet the academic standards. You’re going to have to create courses that don’t meet the academic standards.
LAMB: Correct me on the, on the names and everything. Derrick Bell?
SOWELL: Yes.
LAMB: Harvard Law School, black man.
SOWELL: Yes.
LAMB: Threatened the law school if they didn’t hire a black woman, he’s going, he’s leaving?
SOWELL: Well, if I understand it correctly, he’s taking unpaid leave until such time as they hire a woman of color, as he says. Well, he’s also said that by black, he does not mean skin color, he means those who are really black, not those who think white and look black. And so what he is really saying is he wants ideological conformity in the people that are hired to fill this position. That’s not uncommon either. I know a black woman, for example, who had a Ph.D. — she’s had a book published, she has another contract on another book, she’s taught at a couple of very nice places, she has a devil of a time getting a job — not a job in a prestigious institution, a job teaching at a college. And the reason is that she gets shot down, blackballed, whatever, by people who don’t like her ideology. That’s happening not only racially, it’s also happening where race is not an issue. In a law school, I learned recently, there’s a woman who was being considered for a tenured position, and all the men voted for her and all the woman voted against her, because she does not follow radical feminism, and so you’re getting these ideological tests, so that at the very time that there’s all this mouthing of the word diversity, there is this extremely narrow ideological conformity that is being enforced wherever people have the power to enforce it.
