Abstract
In the early twentieth century we witnessed the emergence of the towering genius of W.E.B. Du Bois. In “The Souls of Black Folk” we were introduced to his seminal ideas of the “veil,” or “seeing oneself through the world of the other,” and being a “stranger in one’s home.” And with the legacy of slavery in the heart of Jim Crow segregation, Black people have a “double-consciousness,” one as Black and the other American, “separate but equal,” the two seemingly “irreconcilable,” yielding a special “second sight”’ that no other human being has: that is yearning to be treated like every other human being in the midst of the most heinous oppression even unto death, to carry that burden of suffering from one generation to the next but with a special genius to find new ways to endure, hope and inspire. With the great Derrick Bell’s work, “Race, Racism, and the American Law,” which pioneered the study of racism in law schools in the 1970s, we confront his startlingly and seemingly pessimistic conclusion — “racism is permanent.”