So what’s all this noise about Barack Obama and Prof. Derrick Bell?

It’s really just another racial attack by the radical, but very much mainstream, rightwing. Intellectualism and conceptual academics threaten order and “certainty” the authoritarian movement advanced by Republican politicians promises.

Here’s Salon’s look at Derrick Bell:

Conservatives are criticizing Barack Obama over a 1991 video that shows him warmly introducing and hugging former Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell , known as the father of "critical race theory." Thursday on CNN, conservative pundit Joel Pollak said Bell’s work was based on the idea that “white supremacy is the order, and it must be overthrown .” Host Soledad O’Brien called that “a complete misreading.” What is critical race theory, and how radical is it really?

Racism, according to this line of thought, is not a matter of bad behavior by individual racists; it’s embedded in American attitudes and institutions.

Bell in particular advanced what he called “interest convergence theory,” which holds that whites will support minority rights only when it’s in their interest as well. To redress racial wrongs, he sympathized with black nationalists’ calls for separate black institutions but also pushed for affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere.

Pollak’s assertion that “white supremacy is at the heart of critical race theory:” Bell didn’t mean, however, that America is full of white supremacists. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic note in “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction ,” those who subscribe to it believe that racism can be an everyday fact of life for people of color even if whites rarely notice it.

And unlike some strands of academic and legal thought, critical race theory has an open and activist agenda, with an emphasis on storytelling and personal experience. It’s about righting wrongs, not just questing after knowledge. But Bell and his fellow theorists, were not radical in the sense of advocating extreme tactics  to achieve political ends, like Greenpeace or the Irish Republican Army. They fought their battles in the halls of academia, not on the streets. And many of their ideas are not radical today in the sense of being outside the mainstream: Critical race theory is widely taught and studied, not only in law but in sociology , education , and other fields. And it is part of the mainstream debates over affirmative action, immigration, and hate-crime laws. 

To give you an even broader view of Bell, let's go to Sarah Palin....with Ed Schultz and Martin Bashir: