UNITED STATES AUTHOR · RACISM · AFRICAN AMERICANS
Randall Kennedy
How should nigger be defined?
— from Nigger, 2002
Most acclaimed
Nigger
2002
""Nigger": it is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of "The ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience." In this tour de force, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law, "put[s] a tracer on 'nigger'," to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise. Kennedy explores such questions as: How should "nigger" be defined? Is it, as some have declared, necessarily more hurtful than other racial epithets? Do blacks have a right to use "nigger" even as others do not? Should the law view "nigger" baiting as a provocation strong enough to reduce the culpability of a person who responds violently to it? Should a person be fired from his or her job for saying "nigger"? How might the destructiveness of "nigger" be assuaged? To be ignorant of the meanings and effects of "nigger," says Kennedy, is to render oneself vulnerable to all manner of peril. This book addresses that concern."--BOOK JACKET.
Race, crime, and the law
1997
The author, a Harvard law professor, discusses the "failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals ... the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection ... the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfairs ... and allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments."--Jacket.
The persistence of the color line
"Timely--as the 2012 presidential election nears--and controversial for its bracing iconoclasm, The Persistence of the Color Line is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency. Renowned for his cool reason vis--̉vis the pitfalls and clichš of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy--former clerk to late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Harvard professor of law, and author of the New York Times bestseller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Kennedy--gives us shrewd and keen essays on the complex relationship between "the first black president" and his African-American constituency. The Persistence of the Colorline tackles hot-button issues: the nature of racial opposition to Obama; whether Obama has any special responsibility to African-Americans; the increasing irrelevance of traditional racial politics and the consequences thereof; electoral politics and cultural chauvinism; black patriotism and its antithesis (essentialism and rebellion); differences between Obama's presentation of himself to blacks and whites and the challenges posed by the dream of a post-racial society; the far from simple symbolism of Obama as leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors. As the National Law Journal puts it: "Randall Kennedy is doing the smartest work in the area of race." Here, in The Persistence of the Color Line, Kennedy--eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right--offers a gimlet eyed view of Obama's triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America"--