Randall Kennedy
November 18, 2021
Randall Kennedy has been popping up online as he discusses his new book, Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture
Harvard Magazine on Randall Kennedy
May-June Issue 2013
Jim Braude speaks with Randall Kennedy - WGBH Greater Boston (9:58)
October 5, 2021
A brief clip.. Randall Kennedy on "Civility" (1:41)
This is a hard book to put down and we highly recommend it. Here are a just a few of the essay titles, all of them challenging and provocative:
Shall We Overcome? Optimism and Pessimism in African American Racial Thought
The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril
Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste
How Black Students Brought the Constitution to Campus
Black Power Hagiography
Should We Admire Nat Turner?
Racial Promised Lands?
Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History and Culture
Randall Kennedy. Pantheon, $30 (544p) ISBN 978-0-5933-1604-7
A middle path through America’s racial turmoil is mapped in these trenchant essays. Harvard Law professor Kennedy ... updates previously published pieces that survey hot-button issues and enduring controversies involving race and the law, including the George Floyd protests, campus movements to remove memorials to racists, moral questions surrounding Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 insurrection against Virginia slaveholders, the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, and the tension between integrationism and separatism in Black social thought. It’s a wide-ranging volume that explores constitutional law; harrowing cases of racial oppression; pioneering figures such as Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom Kennedy clerked; the rise of “distinctively Black names”; and the influential ideas of segregationist George Wallace and Black nationalist Elijah Muhammad. Stoutly defending his centrist stance on race against excesses of the right and left, Kennedy revisits his family’s struggles with racism and tartly dismisses conservative Justice Clarence Thomas as “a Republican apparatchik skilled in bureaucratic self-promotion and the advancement of retrograde policies,” but pushes back against critical race theory in legal studies, speech restrictions (he enunciates the N-word “in full and out loud” in classroom discussions of inflammatory speech), and abolition of the police. In a time of polarized racial politics, Kennedy’s closely reasoned and humanely argued takes offer an appealing alternative.
... Publishers Weekly
The following two essays provide an introduction to Randall Kennedy's thought, approach, and the style of his written work. A version of each is included in Say It Loud!
Note that this essay, published in Volume 1 of the new American Journal of Law and Equality (more here), appears with minimal changes in Say It Loud!.
Note that Kennedy expanded this essay somewhat and renamed it, "The Civil Rights Act Did Make a Difference," for its appearance in Say It Loud!.
...and if you'd like more Kennedy, we're happy to oblige
On September 14, 2016, Randall Kennedy delivered this talk on The Desegregation of Medicine, as part of the Diversity and US Legal History Series at Harvard Law School. (49:06)
"Nigger": The Strange Career Continues" Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture, pp. 210-216.
(Note that the essay's title references Kennedy's 2002 book, nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word)
The Kennedy essay on the left was published as a review in the London Review of Books, July 30, 2020. With some modifications and the addition of the section below, it was included in Say It Loud! and titled "Eric Foner and the Unfinished Mission of Reconstruction."
Viewed during our session on November 18