Aliens Offer To Fix America in Exchange for Every Black Citizen | The Space Traders

The Space Traders by Derrick Bell pdf: https://blog.richmond.edu/criticalracetheory/files/2019/02/The-Chronicle-of-the-Space-Traders.pdf Derrick Bell was a civil rights lawyer and the first Black tenured professor at Harvard Law School. In his 1992 story The Space Traders, extraterrestrial visitors offer the United States enough gold and technology to erase its debt, restore the environment, and provide practically unlimited clean energy. Their price is every Black person in America. In this episode, expect to learn how Bell imagines the offer moving through the president’s cabinet, Congress, corporate America, religious institutions, civil rights organizations, and a national vote. The story examines how political leaders can decide on an outcome first and then search the law for the precedent needed to defend it. The conversation also covers tokenism, respectability politics, capitalism, public self-interest, the limits of legal equality, and whether the United States would make the same decision today. It ends with a larger science-fiction question: if aliens arrived, who would have the authority to speak for humanity? Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler. Lead with curiosity.