Randall Kennedy

The Supreme Court is supposed to rule by the law alone. But Harvard’s Randall Kennedy says that doesn't always happen. “A very common misconception is that the Supreme Court is above politics," he says. "With all the marble palace and the robes and the funny words and all of that, beneath all of that is a political struggle.” So let's stop pretending that the court is a magisterial, impartial arbiter of the law. The law, Kennedy says, is a distillation of our politics. Top ACLU lawer David Cole disagrees.

For decades, scholar Randall Kennedy has been writing about race, culture and the law. “We are certainly much further from the racial promised land than I had thought that we were," he says. "The forces of racism are deeper, stronger, more influential than one would like.” And yet, Kennedy doesn't think today's young activists have a winning strategy. “You need a big tent to advance your political agenda. You need to bring on board people who are not already on your side," he adds. "Do not needlessly alienate people. If that's respectability politics, count me in.” Today, On Point: Randall Kennedy on race, culture and the law across generations.

In his latest book, “Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, And Culture,” Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy discusses everything from why he thinks Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a “sellout” to how the election of Donald Trump left his optimism for a racially equitable nation “profoundly shaken.” He joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss all that and more. Kennedy responded to a recent wave of Supreme Court justices lamenting the politicization of the Court. He called the claims “ridiculous.” “The Supreme Court is inevitably political,” he said. “Clearly it matters who these people are. Clearly our law is largely dependent on the personnel that make it to these seats on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

This month, Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, published a collection of essays titled “Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture.” The Civil Rights Act and antiracist activism are among Kennedy’s topics, and the book includes provocative essays about Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and Thurgood Marshall. In a conversation with the Gazette, the legal scholar answered critics of his work, described his politics, and explained why his hopes for racial equality in the U.S. have dimmed. The interview was edited for clarity and length.

This month, Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, published a collection of essays titled “Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture.” The Civil Rights Act and antiracist activism are among Kennedy’s topics, and the book includes provocative essays about Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and Thurgood Marshall. In a conversation with the Gazette, the legal scholar answered critics of his work, described his politics, and explained why his hopes for racial equality in the U.S. have dimmed. The interview was edited for clarity and length. GAZETTE: You talk in your book about your family history. How has it informed your views on race? KENNEDY: My family history has been profoundly influential on my views on race. I was born in Columbia, South Carolina, but I grew up in Washington, D.C., because my parents were afraid for their future in South Carolina. I asked my father once why he moved. His response to me was, “Because either a white man was going to kill me or I was going to kill a white man.” That’s why I grew up in Washington, D.C. Race was a constant topic of conversation in my household.

The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy’s new book, “Say It Loud!,” collects 29 of his essays. Kennedy’s opinions about the subjects listed in the book’s subtitle — race, law, history and culture — tend to be complex, and he’s not afraid to change his mind. He says on the podcast that there’s “no shame” in admitting you’re wrong, and that he does just that in the book when he finds it appropriate. “I thought that the United States was much further down the road to racial decency than it is,” Kennedy says. “Donald Trump obviously trafficked in racial resentment, racial prejudice in a way that I thought was securely locked in the past. This has had a big influence on me. I used to be a quite confident racial optimist. I am not any longer. I’m still in the optimistic camp — I do think that we shall overcome — but I’m uneasy. I’m uneasy in a way that was simply not the case, let’s say, 10 years ago.”

This month saw the publication of the inaugural issue of The American Journal of Law and Equality, a project developed by three Harvard Law School professors in collaboration with MIT Press. The first issue features a variety of views from legal, academic and philosophical scholars, including its three editors and founders: 300th Anniversary University Professor Martha Minow; Michael R. Klein Professor of Law Randall L. Kennedy; and Robert Walmsley University Professor Cass R. Sunstein ‘78.

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy: A string of professors have been condemned, disciplined, even fired for saying the N-word in full.

Author and Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy joins us to talk about his new book, a collection of essays titled, "Say It Loud: On Race, Law, History and Culture."

We asked staff members at Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, Frugal Bookstore, Brookline Booksmith, and Trident Booksellers & Café for the titles they’re most excited to dive into this season. ... “Say It Loud!” by Randall Kennedy (Sept. 7) Cropper said she is excited for the release of this collection of 29 essays from Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School. The book includes both previously published and new pieces that explore race and social justice in America. “It’s his thoughts on the realities and what he imagines on race in America,” Cropper said. “It’s his personal essays on race, on culture, on history, on law.”

Book review: Randall Kennedy dismisses claims that American university campuses are racist. He assails the sanctification of Malcolm X, saying that his most prominent biographer, the late Columbia University professor Manning Marable, “accords his hero a stature in memory that he lacked in history.” Kennedy is against taking names off buildings because the person in question was a racist, and questions identity based on race rather than individuality. To those who decry the “respectability politics” of calling for Black people to maintain mainstream standards of behavior, Kennedy ripostes that this kind of discipline has indeed benefited Black people in the past — there was nothing “street” about most civil rights leaders of yore, for example, and they liked it that way. Why, then, is Kennedy, a Black professor at Harvard Law School, not typically included on the list of Black conservatives or even “heterodox Black thinkers,” to use the currently fashionable term of art? The anthology “Say It Loud!” teaches us why. This collection of 29 of his essays lends us the fullest portrait yet between two covers of Kennedy’s thought, and just as much of it fits the mold of Black thought traditionally treated as “authentic” as does not.

‘Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture,’ by Randall Kennedy (Pantheon, Sept. 7) Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, takes up everything from Frederick Douglass to George Floyd’s legacy in this collection of new and previously published essays.

Between 1525 and 1866, more than 12 million Africans were shipped to the New World as slaves. After some 200 years, slavery was abolished, and yet another century of Jim Crow, coupled with discriminatory housing and lending policies, contributed to its legacy. Dealing with the relics of that stain on American history is part of the national dilemma. But exactly how to do it is our question; something lawmakers in Washington are also now debating. A top aide to President Joe Biden recently said that the White House will ‘start acting now’ on reparations for African Americans. Some say it’s long over-due. Reparations, they say, are important to start to address the moral injury slavery inflicted. Others say direct payments to African Americans will divide the black community, exaggerate racial tensions and prove impossible to administer. Arguing that reparations are the way to go is Cornell William Brooks, former president and CEO of the NAACP.Arguing that direct payments to African Americans are not the most effective means of addressing the legacy of slavery, and that they could have unintended consequences is Randall LeRoy Kennedy is an American law professor and author at Harvard University.

When I spoke to the Princeton University legal scholar and political philosopher Robert P. George in August, he offered a vivid zoological metaphor to describe what happens when outrage mobs attack academics. When hunted by lions, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” A herd of elephants, by contrast, will “circle around the vulnerable elephant.” ... George was then recruiting the founding members of an organization designed to fix the collective-action problem that causes academics to scatter like zebras. What had begun as a group of 20 Princeton professors organized to defend academic freedom at one college was rapidly scaling up its ambitions and capacity: It would become a nationwide organization...Today, that organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance, formally issued a manifesto declaring that “an attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack on academic freedom everywhere,” and committing its nearly 200 members to providing aid and support in defense of “freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens,” “freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment,” and “freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.” ... Some of the founding members from outside of Princeton include Randall L. Kennedy, Orlando Patterson, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Janet Halley, and Cornel West at Harvard; Brian Leiter and Dorian S. Abbot at the University of Chicago; Sheri Berman at Barnard; and Kathryn L. Lynch at Wellesley.