The classic work on American racism as well as the struggle for racial justice

In Faces at the Bottom of the Good, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an essential and permanent component of American society. BLACK challenges for equality are doomed to fail so long as the majority of whites usually do not see their very own well-being threatened by the position quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to the unsatisfied truth and abandon a misplaced beliefs in inevitable improvement. Only then will blacks, and the ones whites who sign up for with them, be in a position to produce viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of racism. ‘Freed from the stifling rigidity of relying unthinkingly over the slogan ‘we shall overcome,” he writes, ‘we are impelled both to live every day more fully and to examine critically the actual effectiveness of traditional civil privileges remedies.’

With a fresh foreword by Michelle Alexander, Faces at the Bottom of the Well is urgent and essential reading within the issue of racism in the us.