ABSTRACT
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:8, English Standard Version)
One of the characteristics of the scholarship of critical race theorist Derrick Bell was the use of both spiritual texts and songs as a means to “better understand the fundamental question undergirding the theoretical formulation of many race-based analyses of social relations” (Tate, 2003, p. 123). For example, Bell (1987) used Jeremiah 8:20 to frame his book And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. He asserted that three decades after the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954 regarding school desegregation, we were still not saved. According to Bell, the achievement of Brown v. Board of Education had been “so eroded as to bring us once again into fateful and frightful coincidence with Jeremiah’s lament” (p. 3).
