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Awarded the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law, Mr. Kennedy writes for a wide range of scholarly and general interest publications, and sits on the editorial boards of The Nation, Dissent, and The American Prospect. A member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, Mr. Kennedy was awarded an honorary degree by Haverford College and is a former trustee of Princeton University.
Hardcover: 240 pages In the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another stigma of our racial discourse: "selling out," or racial betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. He atomizes the vicissitudes of the term and shows how its usage bedevils blacks and whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole. Kennedy begins his exploration of selling out with a cogent, historical definition of the "black" community, accounting precisely for who is considered black and who is not. He looks at the ways in which prominent members of that community--Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama, among others--have been stigmatized as sellouts. He outlines the history of the suspicion of racial betrayal among blacks, and he shows how current fears of selling out are expressed in thought and practice. He offers a rigorous and bracing case study of the quintessential "sellout"--Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most vilified black public official in American history. And he gives is a first-person reckoning of how he himself has dealt with accusations of having sold out at Harvard, especially after the publication of Nigger. Lucidly and powerfully articulated, Sellout is essential to any discussion of the troubled history of race in America.
Paperback: 688 pages In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy hits a
nerve at the center of American society: race relations and
our most intimate ties to each other. Writing with the same
piercing intelligence he brought to his national bestseller
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,
Kennedy here challenges us to examine how prejudices and
biases still fuel fears and inform our sexual, marital, and
family choices.
Paperback: 208 pages Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and noted legal scholar, has produced an insightful and highly provocative book that raises vital questions about the relationship between language, politics, social norms and how society and culture confront racism. Drawing on a wide range of historical, legal and cultural instances Harry S. Truman calling Adam Clayton Powell "that damned nigger preacher"; Title VII court cases in which the use of the word was proof of condoning a "racially hostile work environment"; Quentin Tarantino's liberal use of the word in his films Kennedy repeatedly shows not only the complicated cultural history of the word, but how its meaning, intent and even substance change in context. Smart, well argued and never afraid of facing serious, difficult and painful questions in an unflinching and unsentimental manner, this is an important work of cultural and political criticism. As Kennedy notes in closing: "For bad or for good, nigger is... destined to remain with us for the foreseeable future a reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience." (Jan. 22) Forecast: This may be the book that reignites
larger debates over race eclipsed by September 11. Look for
a bestselling run and huge talk show and magazine coverage
as the Afghanistan news cycle continues to slow; the book
had already been the subject of two New York Times stories
by early January.
Paperback: 560 pages There's no question that nowadays, racial issues pose one
of the biggest obstacles to the fair workings of our
criminal justice system, but exactly how these issues come
into play and what to do about them is a subtler matter. In
this book, Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor who is
black, applies his precise command of the relevant legal
language and legal background to explain and evaluate for
the general reader various current ideas about how race is
and should be involved in meting out criminal justice. His
basic stance is that liberals and conservatives have more
common ground on race and law than it seems at first, and
that blacks have suffered more from being under protected by
law enforcement than from being mistreated as suspects or
defendants, even though it is the latter allegation that
seems to draw the most attention from those who view the
courts through racial lenses. |
Sellout:
The Politics of Racial Betrayal
Interracial
Intimacies
Nigger:
The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
Race,
Crime, and the Law