ABSTRACT
In “The Space Traders,” the final chapter of his 1992 national bestseller Faces at the Bottom of the Well, legal scholar Derrick Bell posed the question, in the form of a fictional narrative: What would happen if “space people” came to the United States and proposed the following trade:
treasure of which the United States was in most desperate need: gold, to bail out the almost bankrupt federal, state, and local governments; special chemicals capable of unpolluting the environment, which was becoming daily more toxic, and restoring to the pristine state it had been before Western explorers set foot on it; and a totally safe nuclear engine and fuel, to relive the nations’ all-but-depleted supply of fossil fuel. In return, the visitors wanted only one thing—and that was to take back to their home star all the African Americans who lived in the United States.
(p. 159)