ABSTRACT
Critical moments are generally easy to discern in retrospect but less so at the time one is living through them. The administration had responded by scheduling the lecture series so as to guarantee the students their money’s worth. And they had invited Bell to participate to dispel any suspicion that the series was aimed at him. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of retrenchment. The gains of the heady civil rights era had stalled and were beginning to be rolled back. Scholars like Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman had already posited that racism is normal—the usual way American society does business—and that racial oppression serves important majoritarian interests. Critical race theorists Kimberle Crenshaw and Angela Harris developed the notion of intersectionality to explain how antidiscrimination law fails women of color.
