Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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 Solidarity

In 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.

RANDALL KENNEDY is Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. His other books are For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008), Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003), and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002). He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Preface xi

1. Shall We Overcome? Optimism and Pessimism in African American Racial Thought 3
2. Derrick Bell and Me 31
3. The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril 77
4. Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste 84
5. The Princeton Ultimatum: Antiracism Gone Awry 93
6. How Black Students Brought the Constitution to Campus 103
7. Race and the Politics of Memorialization 112
8. The Politics of Black Respectability 123
9. Policing Racial Solidarity 138
10. Why Clarence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized 147
11. Say It Loud! On Racial Shame, Pride, Kinship, and Other Problems 155
12. The Struggle for Collective Naming 172
13. The Struggle for Personal Naming 196
14. “Nigger”: The Strange Career Continues 210
15. Should We Admire Nat Turner? 217
16. Frederick Douglass: Everyone’s Hero 233
17. Anthony Burns and the Terrible Relevancy of the Fugitive Slave Act 240
18. Eric Foner and the Unfinished Mission of Reconstruction 255
19. Charles Hamilton Houston: The Lawyer as Social Engineer 272
20. Remembering Thurgood Marshall 284
21. Isaac Woodard and the Education of J. Waties Waring 321
22. J. Skelly Wright: Up from Racism 331
23. On Cussing Out White Liberals: The Case of Philip Elman 342
24. The Civil Rights Act Did Make a Difference! 352
25. Black Power Hagiography 368
26. The Constitutional Roots of “Birtherism” 390
27. Inequality and the Supreme Court 395
28. Brown as Senior Citizen 410
29. Racial Promised Lands? 425

Acknowledgments 449
Notes 451
Index 490

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Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials