Derrick Bell’s Interest Convergence and the Permanence of Racism: A Reflection on Resistance

Abstract

Nothing about this moment — COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black people, Trump’s explicit anti-Black racism, or the mass demonstrations following lethal police use of force against Black people — would have surprised Professor Derrick Bell. These fault lines are not new; rather, these events merely expose longstanding structural damage to the nation’s foundation. A central theme of Bell’s scholarship is the permanence and cyclical predictability of racism. He urged us to accept “the reality that we live in a society in which racism has been internalized and institutionalized,” a society that produced “a culture from whose inception racial discrimination has been a regulating force for maintaining stability and growth.” Bell would have also foreseen Trump’s presidency as the likely follow-up to eight years of the nation’s first Black President. Any amount of racial advancement, Bell argued, signified “temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.” In this reflection, I revisit Bell’s arguments, including his interest convergence theory, to provide clarity on the current moment and to reflect on the way his scholarship has impacted my work as a civil rights lawyer, scholar, and teacher.