Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, freedom of expression, and the regulation of race relations. Mr. Kennedy was born in Columbia, South Carolina. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States.

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.

Randall Kennedy - How I Feel About Obama Returning to Office

 

The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
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Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (April 17, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307455556
ISBN-13: 978-0307455550
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches

Renowned for his insightful, common-sense critiques of racial politics, Randall Kennedy gives us a shrewd and penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency.

Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama; whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans; the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites; the challenges posed by the dream of a post-racial society; the increasing irrelevance of a certain kind of racial politics and its consequences; the complex symbolism of Obama’s achievement and his own obfuscations and evasions regarding racial justice.

Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers an incisive view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.

 

Race, Crime, and the Law
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Paperback: 560 pages
Publisher: Vintage (March 31, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375701842
ISBN-13: 978-0375701849
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.3 x 7.9 inches

Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize

"An original, wise and courageous work that moves beyond sterile arguments and lifts the discussion of race and justice to a new and more hopeful level."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another.

 

Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal
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Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Pantheon (January 8, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375425438
ISBN-13: 978-0375425431
Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 1 inches

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.

 

Interracial Intimacies
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Paperback: 688 pages
Publisher: Vintage (January 6, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375702644
ISBN-13: 978-0375702648
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches

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.

Analyzing the tremendous changes in the history of America's racial dynamics, Kennedy takes us from the injustices of the slave era up to present-day battles over race matching adoption policies, which seek to pair children with adults of the same race. He tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics, the historic role of legal institutions in policing racial boundaries, and the real and imagined pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy. A bracing, much-needed look at the way we have lived in the past, Interracial Intimacies is also a hopeful book, offering a potent vision of our future as a multiracial democracy.

 

Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
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Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage (January 14, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375713719
ISBN-13: 978-0375713712
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches

The word is paradigmatically ugly, racist and inflammatory. But is it different when Ice Cube uses it in a song than when, during the O.J. Simpson trial, Mark Fuhrman was accused of saying it? What about when Lenny Bruce uses it to "defang" it by sheer repetition? Or when Mark Twain uses it in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to make an antiracist statement?

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. 
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Race, Crime, and the Law
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Paperback: 560 pages
Publisher: Vintage (March 31, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375701842
ISBN-13: 978-0375701849
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1 inches

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.