ATLANTA, March 9, 2012, 5:30 a.m. - An expert in Derrick Bell's "Critical Race Theory" says that the way of thinking is not racist and is in line with Martin Luther King.

Texas A&M's Dr. Tommy J. Curry said that Harvard professor's "Critical Race Theory", which examines racism as a structural barrier, is not racist in response to assertions by some conservative journalists trying to make President Obama appear to be extreme for his affiliation with Bell.

Curry, who wrote his dissertation in "Critical Race Theory", with the help of Bell, and regularly speaks on the subject, says that Breitbart.com Editor-in-Chief Joel Pollak is wrong to imply that Bell was racist.

Pollak yesterday got into a verbal tussle with CNN's Soledad O'Brien.

Pollak said: "Derrick Bell is the Jeremiah Wright of academia. He passed away last year, but during his lifetime he developed a theory called 'Critical Race Theory'b which holds that the civil rights movement was a sham and that white supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown."

"There is no literature," that indicates that the theory is racist," Curry told the Redding News Review radio program. "I challenge him to point to any scholarship that has been written in the last 30 years."

Pollack continued: "'Critical Race Theory' holds that civil rights laws are ineffective, that racial equality is impossible, because the legal and Constitutional in America is white supremacist...At every point in his life when he could have followed the path of Martin Luther King, he threw in his lot with the Jeremiah Wrights and the Derrick Bells of the world.”

Still, Curry said that Bell's philosophy was in line with King's views.

"That's not critical race theory," Curry said. "Derrick Bell certainly did not write that. He was a staunch supporter of nonviolence."

"King gives a similar definition," he said. "Saying, 'white supremacy' doesn't make some one a black supremacist."