SAY IT LOUD!

A collection of essays on Black politics and history by a noted legal scholar.

Early on, Harvard Law School professor Kennedy observes that “social relations are complex and messy.” This is true, and people are complex and messy as well. One of Kennedy’s subjects, for example, is Frederick Douglass, who transformed himself from “racial pessimist” to “the most remarkable racial optimist in American history,” having first viewed the Constitution as a thinly disguised instrument of slavery and then taken the view that, under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, the document was actually anti-slavery in nature, at least in part. Language changes, too. 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. In an essay that is certain to raise consternation among some readers, Kennedy defends the use of the N-word “for pedagogical purposes,” writing, “I am simply unwilling to defer to arbiters of opinion who, armed with superficial knowledge, rigidly insist that this or that term is correct or incorrect in the face of a rich and complicated historical record that reveals a wide pattern of usages.” He adds that a lawyer distracted by the ugly language of the N-word or similar racial slurs “is a lawyer with a gaping vulnerability.” Other pieces that are less likely to invite debate concern the role of policing in Black neighborhoods. In Kennedy's view, the problem is less the police per se than “poorly regulated police” whose role is to threaten and control more than to protect and serve. Some of the pieces are of a historical survey nature: telling readers who Elijah Muhammad was, reviewing the runaway slave law of the pre–Civil War era, and so forth. They are less memorable than 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.