Have you ever liked a book so much that you checked it out of the library and just never returned it?

I have. My book is called Faces at the Bottom of the Well. A guest actually recommended it.

And don't worry, I did eventually pay the library back.

It felt like the least I could do.

Derek Bell wrote Faces at the Bottom of the Well back in the early 90s.

He was a prominent lawyer and academic, and this book of his is weird.

It attempts to explain critical race theory, which in the years since has become a right-wing

expletive, using fiction.

One chapter is about what happens when aliens threaten Earth.

But throughout, it articulates how racism feels and how American law can prop racism up better than anything else I've ever read.

My copy is filled with these little post-its.

Anyway, the other day, I got to talk to someone who'd had an experience just like mine, plucked a Derek Bell book off the shelf, opened it up, and thought,

this is the good stuff.

Chapter after chapter after chapter, he explained not only how law was positioning itself as a referee,

but how that was a false understanding of the law.

The law actually creates racial interests. The law actually creates races and then determines what

kind of power you have based on this fiction that the law represented. Kimberly Crenshaw is a lawyer,

but before she'd even landed at law school,

she'd found race, racism, and American law. This was Derek Bell's textbook. It blew my mind.

And it also told me, I need to be at Harvard. I need to study with this man. So I go to Harvard to

find the man that wrote that book. Didn't find him there, though.

He had just left, basically because he was upset that the administration wasn't doing more

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