Bell’s writing is that of nontraditional scholarship, and those set in traditional ways have a hard time accepting his views and would challenge his point of view as threatening. He and other scholars have borrowed from other disciplines and through critical race theory, they attempt to sing a new scholarly song, even if to some listeners their style is strange and their lyrics unseemly. He believes that analysis of legal developments through fiction, personal experience, and the stories of people on the bottom illustrates how race and racism continue to dominate our society. Derrick Bell enlist the use of literary models as a more helpful vehicle than legal precedent in a continuing quest for new direction in his struggle for racial justice, even if racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society. In his opening introduction he…show more content… It was believed that survival and progress seemed to require moving beyond, even rejecting slavery. During this time slavery was barely mentioned in schools and seldom discussed by the descendants of it survivors, particularly those who had somehow moved themselves to the North. Spiritual were sung, however they were detached from their slave origins. At the time the history of slaves and slave owners seemed best left alone. After World War II, slavery became a subject of fascination and a sure means of evoking racial rage as a prelude to righteously repeated demands for “Freedom Now!” The new awareness reached its highest point in 1977, in the television version of Alex Haley’s Roots. This miniseries pointed out that slavery existed and it was awful, but the literary writers managed to lighten the story. White viewers could feel revulsion for slavery without necessarily recognizing American slavery as a burden on the nation’s history, and certainly not a burden requiring reparations in the