The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk

Some legal academics started to blame the basic moral framework of the civil rights movement, with its emphasis on universalism, for these disappointments. Derrick Bell, the biggest influence on the new movement of critical race theory, concluded that civil rights lawyers erred in making desegregation the principal aim of school reform. Bell and other theorists within the tradition of critical race theory also denied that universal moral principles could help to bring about genuine political progress. On closer inspection, they argued, the apparent progress of the civil rights era turned out to be a function of the racial self-interest of whites. They saw American racism as a permanent condition that might shift its nature but would never attenuate.