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Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture
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About Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, And Culture
Product Description A collection of provocative essays exploring the key social justice issues of our time—from George Floyd to antiracism to inequality and the Supreme Court. Kennedy is "among the most incisive American commentators on race" (The New York Times). Informed by sharpness of observation and often courting controversy, deep fellow feeling, decency, and wit, Say It Loud! includes:The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril • Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste • The Princeton Ultimatum: Antiracism Gone Awry • The Constitutional Roots of “Birtherism” • Inequality and the Supreme Court • “Nigger”: The Strange Career Continues • Frederick Douglass: Everyone’s Hero • Remembering Thurgood Marshall • Why Clarence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized • The Politics of Black Respectability • Policing Racial SolidarityIn each essay, Kennedy is mindful of complexity, ambivalence, and paradox, and he is always stirring and enlightening. Say It Loud! is a wide-ranging summa of Randall Kennedy’s thought on the realities and imaginaries of race in America. Review One of Library Journal’s “Titles to Watch 2021” “In these trenchant essays, Kennedy updates previously published pieces that survey hot-button issues and enduring controversies involving race and the law . . . [A] wide-ranging volume that stoutly defend[s] his centrist stance on race against excesses of the right and left . . . In a time of polarized racial politics, Kennedy’s closely reasoned and humanely argued takes offer an appealing alternative. ” —Publishers Weekly “Kennedy observes that “social relations are complex and messy.” Having lived through several eras, Kennedy calls himself a “Black/Negro/Colored/African American” man born in the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Some of the pieces are of a historical survey nature, [others] the author’s denunciations of “antiracism gone awry” and small-step racial justice laws that “are attentive to the pluralism that infuses American practices.” “Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy’s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.” —Kirkus Reviews About the Author RANDALL KENNEDY is the author of six previous books. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He is a memberof the bar of the District of Columbia, of the American Law Institute, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Massachusetts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1. Shall We Overcome? Optimism and Pessimism in African American Racial Thought Take courage . . . ye Afric-Americans! Don’t give up the conflict, for the glorious prize can be won. —Peter Osborne (1832) In the quest for equality, black folks have tried everything. We’ve begged, revolted, entertained, intermarried, and are still treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction and the American work ethic when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits?—Paul Beatty (1996) Within the diverse, always-changing spectrum of black American racial thought can be discerned two broad camps: the optimists and the pessimists—those who believe that blacks are (or can become) members of the American family and those who believe that blacks will always be outsiders; those who predict that we shall overcome and those who conclude that we shall not. I The fight at the founding of what became the United States of America made blacks think about and act upon which outcome would offer a better future: a victory for the colonists with their libertarian rhetoric and entanglement with slavery, or a victory for the Crown, which was, in principle, indifferent to slavery but willing to free the colonists’ bondsmen as a war measure. story of blacks making common cause with the rebels, hoping to elicit a recognition of African American contribu
