Revealed: Derrick Bell's HBO Sci-Fi Blaxploitation Flick

by Joel B. Pollak 

Derrick Bell, the man whose scholarship inspired Barack Obama, was the Jeremiah Wright of academia. 

And a Hollywood cult hero.
Bell was one of the chief proponents of Critical Race Theory, a radical doctrine that holds that American legal institutions—including our civil rights laws—perpetuate white supremacy.
Bell’s ideas were not only radical, but bizarre. After leaving Harvard (he resigned in 1992), he wrote a racialist, antisemitic fictional essay titled “The Space Traders,” which Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski described in the New York Times with disgust:

Imagine, if you will, that space aliens land in the United States and offer ''untold treasure'' in exchange for surrendering all black citizens to them. What does white America do? It votes to accept the deal by overwhelming margins. So says the law professor Derrick Bell, who poses the question in an allegorical tale he calls ''The Space Traders.''
There is opposition, however. Jews condemn the trade as genocidal and organize the Anne Frank Committee to try to stop it. Empathy from another group that has suffered oppression? Not according to Bell. Instead, Jews worry that ''in the absence of blacks, Jews could become the scapegoats.''
Such parables pass for legal scholarship these days…
Consider the ''Space Traders'' story. How does one have a meaningful dialogue with Derrick Bell? Because his thesis is utterly untestable, one quickly reaches a dead end after either accepting or rejecting his assertion that white Americans would cheerfully sell all blacks to the aliens. The story is also a poke in the eye of American Jews, particularly those who risked life and limb by actively participating in the civil rights protests of the 1960's. Bell clearly implies that this was done out of tawdry self-interest. Perhaps most galling is Bell's insensitivity in making the symbol of Jewish hypocrisy the little girl who perished in the Holocaust -- as close to a saint as Jews have. A Jewish professor who invoked the name of Rosa Parks so derisively would be bitterly condemned -- and rightly so.

The essay was not too offensive for Hollywood, however—or HBO, which turned it into a TV movie, Space Traders, in 1994 as part of a “bizarre, thought-provoking” blaxploitation trilogy, Cosmic Slop.
Bell received a writing credit for the short film, which Breitbart.com now presents in full.

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Watch Derrick Bell's Racialist SciFi Film