UPDATE: In a story for ABC News, Jake Tapper asks the White House about Derrick A. Bell’s visits. “The answer from a White House official: this was not the same Derrick A. Bell,” Tapper reports. “He (sic) one had a different birthday than the late law professor, whose birthday was November 6, 1930.” Scribe attempted to confirm this information with the White House yesterday, which was noted in our original report. Click here to view the visitor records.
Visitor logs show that Derrick A. Bell visited the White House twice since President Obama took office. The logs show two visits by an individual of that name on January 29 and 31, 2010.
Derrick Albert Bell, the late Harvard professor and controversial scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory has been thrust into national headlines after conservative bloggers at Breitbart.com posted video of Obama lauding his work at a 1991 rally at Harvard.
Heritage could not independently confirm that the Derrick A. Bell listed is the same individual who spoke at the rally. The White House did not return a request for comment.
In the video, Obama tells the crowd to “Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of professor Derrick Bell.”
Those words tended to be quite controversial. Bell is widely credited with pioneering the field of Critical Race Theory, a radical school of legal thought that holds that the American legal and political systems are inherently racist.
