Brothers Judd Book Reviews

Review of The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:01 EST

We finally made it to Disneyland last week and got to experience some of the rides that differ from Disney World. As we were leaving the park we decided to hop on one with a short wait and opted for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which turned out to be pretty demented. It occurred to me that I had probably never read the original book, only Disney story books when I was a kid, based on their film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Long out of copyright, it’s easy enough to find a version of the text on-line or an audio version (see below)

It’s a curious text, a children’s book that’s not necessarily for children. It is no surprise that Disney latched on to Toad, whose mania for going ever faster leads him to buying, and eventually stealing, cars to race around the country in, with predictably disastrous results.

The car stood in the middle of the yard, quite unattended, the stable-helps and other hangers-on being all at their dinner. Toad walked slowly round it, inspecting, criticising, musing deeply. “I wonder,” he said to himself presently, “I wonder if this sort of car starts easily?” Next moment, hardly knowing how it came about, he found he had hold of the handle and was turning it. As the familiar sound broke forth, the old passion seized on Toad and completely mastered him, body and soul. As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver’s seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

While these scenes are comical in their own right, Toad ends up in prison, with his magnificent abandoned home overrun by the weasels and stoats of the Wild Wood. This gets pretty dark and his friends are forced into stern measures to reform him before a battle to retake Toad Hall.

There are also quite beautiful musings about the pleasures of home and of nature. There’s even a famous chapter that is downright mystical: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was sometimes edited out of versions specifically geared towards kids.

All in all, it is a real pleasure to read and richly deserves its status as a classic.

Grade: A+

Review of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Patrick Keefe)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:01 EST

Gerry Adams has questioned why a “show trial” that forensically examined his alleged role as an IRA leader ever made it to court after the case dramatically collapsed at the last minute. The former Sinn Fein president said he had been subjected to “smears and false accusations” during the two-week trial into his alleged responsibility for three bomb attacks on the British mainland. The case was halted on the last day of proceedings at the High Court in London after a trio of victims withdrew their claim over concerns that they would have to foot Adams’s six-figure legal bill.
-ARTICLE: Gerry Adams: Collapsed ‘show trial’ should have never made it to court: The former Sinn Fein president said he had been subjected to ‘smears and false accusations’ during a damages case that examined his alleged role as an IRA leader (Mario Ledwith, March 20 2026, Times uk)

It is pure coincidence that I read this book–at The Daughter’s recommendation–just as the above trial collapsed. But that outcome is made even more maddening by the dispositive evidence Mr. Keefe lays out, demonstrating that Adams was the leader not just of the political organization Sinn Féin but the terrorist IRA. Nor is it just a matter of him denying responsibility for the mass killings he oversaw, but that he is distancing himself from the damage that perpetrating those murders did to his followers, as chronicled here.

The author is one of our great investigative essayists and the reigning king of The New Yorker. Here he expands on a piece originally written for that magazine:

Jean McConville had just taken a bath when the intruders knocked on the door. A small woman with a guarded smile, she was, at thirty-seven, a mother of ten. She was also a widow: her husband, Arthur, had died eleven months earlier, of cancer. The family continued to live in Divis Flats—a housing complex just off the Falls Road, in the heart of Catholic West Belfast—but had recently moved to a slightly larger apartment. The stove was not connected yet, so Jean’s daughter Helen, who was fifteen, had gone to a nearby chip shop to bring back dinner. “Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke,” Jean told her. It was December, 1972, and already dark at 6:30 P.M. When the children heard the knock, they assumed that it was Helen with the food.

Four men and four women burst in; some wore balaclavas, others had covered their faces with nylon stockings that ghoulishly distorted their features. One brandished a gun. “Put your coat on,” they told Jean. She trembled violently as they tried to pull her out of the apartment. “Help me!” she shrieked.

“I can remember trying to grab my mother,” her son Michael told me recently. He was eleven at the time. “We were all crying. My mother was crying.” Billy and Jim, six-year-old twins, threw their arms around Jean’s legs and wailed. The intruders tried to calm the children by saying that they would bring their mother back: they just needed to talk to her, and she would be gone for only “a few hours.” Archie, who, at sixteen, was the oldest child at home, asked if he could accompany his mother, and the members of the gang agreed. Jean McConville put on a tweed overcoat and a head scarf as the younger children were herded into one of the bedrooms. The intruders called the children by name. A couple of the men were not wearing masks, and Michael realized, to his horror, that the people taking his mother away were not strangers—they were his neighbors.

The first person to speak publicly about involvement in the disappearance of Jean McConville was a former I.R.A. terrorist named Dolours Price. In 2010, Price revealed in a series of interviews that she had been a member of a secret I.R.A. unit called the Unknowns, which conducted clandestine paramilitary work, including disappearances. Price did not participate in the raid on the McConville house, but she drove Jean McConville across the border into the Republic of Ireland, where she was executed. McConville, Price claimed, had been acting as an informer for the British Army, providing intelligence about I.R.A. activity in Divis Flats. The order to disappear her came from the Officer Commanding of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional I.R.A.—the man who held ultimate authority over the Unknowns. According to Price, the Officer Commanding was Gerry Adams.
-ESSAY: Where the Bodies Are Buried: Gerry Adams has long denied being a member of the I.R.A. But his former compatriots claim that he authorized murder. (Patrick Radden Keefe, March 9, 2015, The New Yorker)

He weaves together the McConville murder; a biography of Dolours Price and her sister; the story behind those interviews; Adams’s own life story; and various other strands to render a fascinating, if not comprehensive, look at The Troubles. If the eventual outcome of the IRA’s campaign of violence seems arguably triumphant this account is soaked in tragedy.

I have to admit to being conflicted. One can not believe in self-determination, as I do, and then deny that the Irish are entitled to it. But I am an Anglophile, recall many of these terror attacks and had an ancestor killed centuries ago while occupying the island, so it is not easy to sympathize with the cause. And that ambivalence certainly influences a personal feeling that there is justice in the regrets that Delours and her compatriots express a nd, likewise, outrage that Adams refuses to man up and accept responsibility for his actions. But it seems unlikely that anyone could come away from the book without feeling similarly.

Grade: A-

Review of Come Back Dead (Terence Faherty)

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:01 EST

Ross Macdonald built something else entirely. There is still an investigation, but the detective does not move from bead to bead, encountering scenes in the moment. Instead, he pulls a thread and unravels a tapestry of lies.

The case begins, but it is not the beginning. The real crime is buried in the past: a switched identity, an abandoned child, a family tragedy long suppressed. Yet the past has been covered up. This is the tapestry. As Lew Archer pulls on its threads, the accumulated damage from one generation to the next becomes visible.

Chandler, the poet who worked behind a desk as an oil executive, brings to mind T.S. Eliot, another poet who worked a day job at Lloyd’s Bank and wrote The Wasteland between drafting financial memos. Yet it is Macdonald who embodies the truth of Eliot’s famous dictum: the past is always present. In our beginning is our end.

This is what makes Macdonald a quiet author. His scenes accumulate meaning. A conversation may appear trivial until it is placed beside another. A casual remark about a missing daughter, a half-forgotten marriage, a name that doesn’t quite fit: details that mean nothing until, pages later, they mean everything. There are no standalone beads.
-Searching for a Unified Theory of Chandler versus Macdonald: The Necklace and the Tapestry (Frank Ladd, 2/20/26, CrimeReads)

While Terence Faherty’s hero, Scott Elliott, has more of the external qualities of Philip Marlowe, this fine mystery ultimately finds its way into Ross MacDonald territory. Scotty is a former actor who now works for a Hollywood security firm. He’s married with kids, unlike Marlowe or Archer, but his romantic nature is reflected most in his love of how the movies and movie-making used to be.

In this installment in the short series he is brought in to protect a director modelled on Orson Welles, who is trying to restore his original cut of a film that is obviously a riff on The Magnificent Ambersons. Someone is sabotaging that attempted restoration and the director - a wunderkind turned flop - is having difficulty raising money. So when an Indiana businessman - whose family company parallels the subject of the movie - offers funding for the production the reshoots move to his company’s town. (Scotty just happens to be an Indianan himself.)

Here the novel shifts as we are introduced to a family haunted by the ghost of hero killed in WWII, a sexy widow, a stern matriarch, Klansmen, a disfigured war veteran, and more. And Scotty begins unravelling the tapestry.

Scotty is a likable lead and ditching the family lets him function as a lone hero for the most part. There’s just the right amount of misdirection, but leavened with enough clues that the resolution feels earned. All in all a fine gloss on the classic private eye story.

Grade: B+

Review of The Hawaiian Cult that raised Tulsi Gabbard (with Christine Gralow) [Podcast] (Christine Gralow)

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:01 EST

"Tulsi was being groomed for a political position because Chris Butler had political aspirations," Marshall said. "He wanted the influence. It was very unusual because women in Science of Identity aren't really encouraged to do anything."
-ESSAY: Tulsi Gabbard Described as ‘Advanced Devotee’ in Alleged Cult (Nick Mordowanec and Monica Sager, Nov 22, 2024, Newsweek)

I also remember Chris Butler held this larger than life presence in my childhood. Everything I did I had to think about how it benefitted him. He was my parents spiritual master and they looked to him for guidance on everything, from what to eat, to how to raise their children, and they did it all without question. When I talk to people about the lack of questioning, they find that aspect odd. It is odd, but to put it into perspective, I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God’s voice on earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God, and because we believed in reincarnation, that meant that you would be reborn as the lowest lifeform imaginable and then have to spend eon’s working your way back into God’s good graces. So questioning the leader was spiritual suicide, which was seen as worse than death. So no-one questioned. Chris Butler also would ridicule the intelligence of anyone he didn’t like, belittling anyone he felt was questioning his authority even slightly. He demanded the utmost dedication and loyalty from his followers and if he didn’t get it, the punishments were swift and severe. I remember hearing stories of people who were told they weren’t allowed to eat because they didn’t make food to his liking, who were not allowed to sleep because there was a light making a buzzing noise in the house, and the follower didn’t have the foresight to fix the issue ahead of time.

Literally everything we did had to go through Chris. If you wanted to work outside of the group, you had to ask his permission. No-one could get married without his consent. From the late 80's all of us kids were removed from public schools because he didn’t want them influencing our minds away from our service to him. So from that point we were home schooled, until there were schools established in the Philippines. After that all the children were sent to the boarding schools there for intensive schooling. From the small pieces of information that made it out of the schools to me, a lot of the kids were traumatised by the environment, as it was almost prison like. Classes were on hygiene and cooking and all the ways that they would need to serve Chris Butler best. It’s only speculation, but I am certain that this was because places like the US and Australia had standards of education that the home schools has to meet, and they just weren’t. They could avoid scrutiny by having the kids in boarding schools in the Philippines. I can’t even imagine how dreadful it was for my friends who got sent there. I was lucky to avoid it. I didn’t avoid the lack of schooling though, and by the time I officially left the Science of Identity Foundation in 1997, just before I turned 20, I had only received up to a 5th grade education.
-ESSAY: An Insiders Perspective on Tulsi Gabbard and her Guru (Lalita, Sep 24, 2017, Medium)

Gabbard's rise in US politics came out of nowhere, and is inexplicable until one considers how Sangh donations gave her a leg up when she was a virtual unknown. The first Indian-American donors to her first congressional campaign-who were also among the first non-Hawaiians to support her-are top executives in RSS affiliates in the United States. Donor names provided in filings to the Federal Election Commission, which I collated with lists from Sangh websites and promotional materials as well as media reports, reveal that hundreds of leaders and members of such groups gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Gabbard in the formative years of her congressional career. Kallie Keith-Agaran, a Democratic activist in Hawaii, has also compiled a database of Gabbard's donors. Her extensive documentation of their contributions and affiliations closely corroborates my independent findings.

Gabbard emerged on the US political scene at a pivotal moment for the Sangh’s aspiration to see Modi as the Indian prime minister. Since 2002, Modi and the RSS had both grown increasingly controversial in the United States, facing protests by academics as well as censure by the US government. Modi stood accused of complicity in the anti-Muslim pogrom that had taken place in Gujarat, while he was the chief minister of the state. Even by conservative estimates, the pogrom took over a thousand lives. Afterwards, he was denied a visa to the country. The greatest diplomatic triumph for the American Sangh was rehabilitating Modi’s tainted reputation in the United States. Gabbard played a significant part in that project.

There are nearly 4.5 million Indian Americans in the United States. Just over half are Hindu. Fifty percent are registered Democrats, but they tend to shy away from partisanship-especially those who belong to Sangh offshoots. Constituting less than 1.5 percent of the population, Indian Americans are not typically considered a significant voter base. Yet they have emerged as a crucial constituency for Indian politics, given their vast support for Modi at his “rock-star” receptions in New York and California, and his dependence on them for “diaspora diplomacy.”

Amongst Gabbard’s many donors are various members of the US chapters of groups such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the Overseas Friends of the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. Thanks to her connection to leading figures of the American Sangh-such as Vijay Pallod, a businessman from Texas; Bharat Barai, an oncologist from the Chicago region; and Mihir Meghani, a physician from California-she has been eagerly welcomed at many Sangh fundraisers around the country.

Even as mainstream interfaith groups refused to participate in events hosted by the American Sangh, Gabbard repeatedly spoke at its events, in the United States and abroad. While organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published reports warning about the spread of Hindu-nationalist violence under Modi’s administration, Gabbard has called India an “indispensable partner” to the United States, and pushed for enhanced cooperation between the two countries. Gabbard's donors have publicly applauded her for supporting Modi before he was elected, for speaking against the US decision to deny him a visa after 2002 and for working against congressional efforts to recognise human-rights violations in India.
-ESSAY: All in the Family: The American Sangh’s affair with Tulsi Gabbard (Pieter Friedrich, 01 August, 2019, Caravan)

This page is less a review than an attempt to marshal links about how bizarre Donald Tump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is and her links to the Science of Identity cult. I did not find any good books on the topic but recently heard this excellent podcast: The Hawaiian Cult that raised Tulsi Gabbard (with Christine Gralow) (Mission Implausible, Feb 8, 2026). Ms Gralow’s reporting on the subject is unmatched and her experience of harassment by the cultists probably explains why there is not more reporting on this scandalous story.

Grade: B

Review of Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:01 EST

-ESSAY: In Praise of Daphne du Maurier (Parul Sehgal, July 6, 2017, NY Times)

In 1937 an Englishwoman - bright and bored and drowning in children - sat down and sketched out a story. “Very roughly, the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second,” she wrote. “Until wife 2 is haunted day and night … a tragedy is looming very close and crash! Bang! Something happens.”

-ESSAY: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca taught me how to love literature: I didn’t have high hopes for Rebecca, but I believe it to be the underrated classic of the 20th century (John Crace, 20 Aug 2014, The Guardian)

Then came Rebecca. I had no great hopes for it. As far as I recall, it had a fey-looking heroine on the front - I’m fairly sure I hadn’t read a book written by a woman since I’d stopped reading Enid Blyton - and a strapline that said “Daphne du Maurier’s classic gothic romance”. I didn’t know what a gothic romance was, but it didn’t sound that great. Still, the back cover blurb promised death and intrigue, so it was worth a punt. Better than mooching around aimlessly waiting for the TV schedules to start.

From the opening sentence – “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again” – to the final – “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea” – I was hooked. I must have read it all in two sittings; three at most. The characters remained with me – in particular, the one who was never there – long after I stopped reading. Even now, 40 years on, they have still never left me. A while ago, in a fit of extravagance, I bought a signed first edition with a book advance. I told my family it was an investment, but it was really a desire to get as physically close to Rebecca as was possible; to re-experience the book as others had first done in 1938.

I fear I’ve made a terrible mistake. I have never liked Wuthering Heights and, somehow, in my mind it became associated so closely with Rebecca that I’d never bothered reading the latter. Just the classification as a gothic romance made it seem to much of a chick book to be bothered. Obviously, I should have known better, given that Alfred Hitchcock had adapted it for film. Like Mr. Crace, above, I ended up being blown away by it.

There are a number of delicious twists that I won’t give away, in case you’ve avoided it too, but it seems safe to say that one of the main themes is “gaslighting.” The young heroine is rescued from her servitude to a repellent wealthy American woman by the dashing, but solemn, Max de Winter.

De Winter is an object of fascination in high society because of his legendary home, Manderley, and the tragic death of his wife, Rebecca. When the newlyweds return to the manor the new wife finds herself being compared to the old and found wanting. In particular, Rebecca’s maid, Mrs. Danvers, torments the woman she sees as unworthy to inherit the position of her former mistress. The entire novel is suffused not just with the gloom of the prior tragedy but with foreboding for what is to follow. As an exercise in creating an atmosphere, the novel is really unmatched. Come for the dread, stay for the psycho-sexual surprises.

Grade: A

Review of Pay-Off in Blood (Brett Halliday)

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:01 EST

Shayne debuted in the novel Dividend on Death first published in 1939, written by Dresser as Halliday. Fifty Shayne novels were published in hardcover written by Dresser (until 1958) and a variety of ghost-writers. Twenty-seven more were published as paperback originals for a total of seventy-seven. There are also 300 short stories (although many of these are condensed from, or were expanded into, published novels), a dozen films, radio programs and television shows, and a few comic book appearances that included the character.
-WIKIPEDIA: Michael Shayne

Other recurring characters in the stories are reporter Tim Rourke, Miami Police Chief Will Gentry ( a close friend of Shayne's), Miami Beach Chief of Detectives Peter Painter (a foe of Shayne's), and Shayne's secretary (and occasional romantic interest) Lucy Hamilton.

Michael Shayne stands out from his fictional detective peers primarily due to his professional ineptitude. He is perpetually financially unstable and desperate for any work he can get. A typical story often finds him on the brink of losing his office, or having his furniture repossessed. He is often physically assaulted, and outmaneuvered, which usually results in his embarrassment, especially in the presence of police or other investigators. His frequent misfortunes are largely attributed to his strict ethical code, which prevents him from accepting morally ambiguous cases and the cases he does usually take are desperate clients and wind up being pro bono, leaving him more broke than before. Additionally, his tendency to aid others often leads to regret when those he helps betray him. Despite these setbacks, Shayne manages to maintain a positive reputation based solely on his honesty and integrity. A recurring theme in the narratives surrounding Shayne is his widespread recognition; regardless of his location or the company he keeps, he is invariably known by those around him who are still willing to hire him.
Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine

It’s always fascinating when a writer/character who was so popular for so long eventually goes missing from the culture. Other than Shane Black borrowing from a Mike Shayne plot for his film, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang-and even then it was from a ghostwritten text, not a Brett Halliday novel-this series and its creator have largely been memory-holed.

Fortunately, Kindle has some $1.99 bargains on books in the series, so I grabbed this one. Though it too is from the post-Halliday stretch, it contains most of the elements listed above. The lanky red-head, Mike, is hired-very much against his upright inclinations-to make sure that a doctor’s blackmail payment goes off without a hitch. The victim believes that just the presence of the well-known detective will keep him safe. Of course, hitches ensue and Peter Painter gives Mike a hard time while Tim, Will and Lucy support him in his investigation. It is not revealing too much to say that the client also turns out to be unreliable.

The plot is suitably convoluted until its satisfactory wrap-up. But what I enjoyed most was the characterization of Mike and the period details. A great deal is made of the difference between Miami and Miami Beach. Mike’s drink of choice is cognac, rather than the bourbon we would expect of a hard-boiled dick. And the food choices are jarring, from Mike making himself a one-pound patty of ground beef to him and Lucy ordering stuffed pancakes flambe at a fancy restaurant: stuffed with chicken wings and gizzards.

The old radio show is also worth a listen.

Grade: B

Review of Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Derrick Bell, Jr)

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:01 EST

Critical race theory (CRT) is an approach to studying U.S. policies and institutions that is most often taught in law schools. Its foundations date back to the 1970s, when law professors including Harvard Law School’s Derrick Bell began exploring how race and racism have shaped American law and society.

The theory rests on the premise that racial bias - intentional or not - is baked into U.S. laws and institutions. Black Americans, for example, are incarcerated at much higher rates than any other racial group, and the theory invites scrutiny of the criminal justice system's role in that.
-ESSAY: Explainer: What 'critical race theory' means and why it's igniting debate (Gabriella Borter, September 22, 2021, Reuters)

First things first; Derrick Bell is a legendary figure in the black Civil Rights movement, but was generally pretty anonymous until the Right got swept up in the racial hysteria surrounding the rise of Barack Obama and his support of Bell. The professor had been a leader in the development of Critical Race Theory and, inevitably, he, Obama and CRT were all caricatured and cast in the worst possible light. But, no reasonable person can read the definition above and deny its truth without completely blinding themself to our fraught racial history and its lingering effects. Just yesterday the Times ran a horrific story about a “time out box” that is used in a school system that is predominantly Native American and only mentions in passing that:

The incident brought renewed attention to the enduring use of restraint and seclusion in education. The practice — which can include putting children in closets, sending them into timeout boxes and locking them in tiny rooms — has been criticized for decades.

But it sometimes remains in use in districts across the United States to manage students’ behavior, and children with disabilities and students of color are disproportionately subjected to it.

Contra the Anti-Woke, these disproportionalities exist in many institutions and we ought always to take them into consideration and seek to eradicate them. Such is the promise of the Founding, that all men are Created equal and that all laws ought apply equally.

As to the argument of this specific text, I’m not naive, but suffice it to say that when I made what is basically the case presented herein, in a Constitutional Law class in 1990, it was not greeted kindly. Then again, I was a conservative white male maintaining that civil rights activists and the Supreme Court had made a mistake, in Brown v. Board of Ed, and should have demanded equality of education rather than an end of separation. It would be one thing if whites had been willing to completely integrate education and equalize that way, but Professor Bell charts the resistance to integration. As importantly, he marshals the statistics to show that black public school students and schools remain largely underfunded compared to most white students and predominantly white schools. No one would deny that the situation has improved since the days of open Jim Crow, but, likewise, one can’t really pretend that there are not still inequities in how we educate students that are simply accepted because of the racial makeup of the least advantaged.

We ought not fool ourselves that black Americans would still have had a fight on their hands to extract the funding to equalize education, but it seems likely that politicians would have preferred to spend money on permitting diversity. Such an arrangement–though obviously indulging racism–could have brought increased salaries for black educators, expenditures on the physical plants in predominantly black neighborhoods and acquisition of more modern educational resources. It is hard to imagine that the outcomes would have been any worse and they might, hopefully, have been much better.

Though there is much else worth considering in the book, this basic statement is its crux:

The danger with our commitment to the principle of racial equality is that it leads us to confuse tactics with principles. The principle of gaining equal educational opportunity for black children was and is right. But our difficulties came when we viewed racial balance and busing as the only means of achieving that goal.[...]

[T]ime proved that the persistent educational gap between black and white students was only indirectly traceable to segregation. Instead, the root of the problem appeared to be the substantial disparities in the resources provided to black students relative to white students. Many, including myself, decided that given the difficulty of integrating black and Latino students with their swiftly fleeing white counterparts, we should concentrate on desegregating the money.
? Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants

Amen, brother.

Grade: B+

Review of Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Derrick Bell, Jr)

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:01 EST

Critical race theory (CRT) is an approach to studying U.S. policies and institutions that is most often taught in law schools. Its foundations date back to the 1970s, when law professors including Harvard Law School’s Derrick Bell began exploring how race and racism have shaped American law and society.

The theory rests on the premise that racial bias - intentional or not - is baked into U.S. laws and institutions. Black Americans, for example, are incarcerated at much higher rates than any other racial group, and the theory invites scrutiny of the criminal justice system's role in that.
-ESSAY: Explainer: What 'critical race theory' means and why it's igniting debate (Gabriella Borter, September 22, 2021, Reuters)

The incident brought renewed attention to the enduring use of restraint and seclusion in education. The practice — which can include putting children in closets, sending them into timeout boxes and locking them in tiny rooms — has been criticized for decades.

But it sometimes remains in use in districts across the United States to manage students’ behavior, and children with disabilities and students of color are disproportionately subjected to it.

The danger with our commitment to the principle of racial equality is that it leads us to confuse tactics with principles. The principle of gaining equal educational opportunity for black children was and is right. But our difficulties came when we viewed racial balance and busing as the only means of achieving that goal.[...]

[T]ime proved that the persistent educational gap between black and white students was only indirectly traceable to segregation. Instead, the root of the problem appeared to be the substantial disparities in the resources provided to black students relative to white students. Many, including myself, decided that given the difficulty of integrating black and Latino students with their swiftly fleeing white counterparts, we should concentrate on desegregating the money.
? Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants

Amen, brother.

Grade: B+