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"Pshaw, fellas. I think I heard some hubbub coming from the Green."

I just finished reading Peter Wood’s post in the Innovations section. It made me nervous.

Cleverly titled “Bell Epoque,” Wood talks about the brouhaha surrounding an old videotape of President Obama in 1991 speaking—as a student at Harvard Law school—at a rally in support of one of that institution’s professors, Derrick Bell (requiescat in pacem) which is now being fetishized by some of the more conservative “nutjobs” (to quote a nice old Brooklyn term used by one of the commentators on Wood’s post) as evidence of a leftist conspiracy to remove whiteness and all forms of whiteitude from power.

Bell, whose legacy you can learn more about here, wrote about race and class in America. Some white people find…

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