Includes bibliographical references (pages 451-489) and index.
Contents:
Shall we overcome? Optimism and pessimism in African American racial thought -- Derrick Bell and me -- The George Floyd moment -- Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and racial caste -- The Princeton ultimatum : anti-racism gone awry -- How black students brought the Constitution to campus -- Race and the politics of memorialization -- The politics of black respectability -- Policing racial solidarity -- Why Clarence Thomas Ought to be ostracized -- Say it loud! . . . On racial shame, pride, kinship, and other problems -- The struggle for collective naming -- The struggle for personal naming -- "Nigger" : the strange career continues -- Should we admire Nat Turner? -- Frederick Douglass : everyone's hero -- Anthony Burns and the terrible relevancy of the Fugitive Slave Act -- Eric Foner and the unfinished mission of reconstruction -- Charles Hamilton Houston : the lawyer as social engineer -- Remembering Thurgood Marshall -- Isaac Woodard and the education of J. Waities Waring -- J. Skelly Wright : up from racism -- On cussing out white liberals : The Case of Philip Elman -- The Civil Rights Act did make a difference! -- Black power hagiography -- The Constitutional roots of "birtherism" -- Inequality and the Supreme Court -- Racial promised lands?
Summary:
"A gathering of essays by the acclaimed Harvard legal scholar and public intellectual, that explores all the relevant cultural and historical issues of the past quarter century having to do with race and race relations in America. With a gimlet eye, decency and humaneness (and often courting controversy), Randall Kennedy chronicles his reactions over the past quarter century to arguments, events, and people that have compelled him to put pen to paper. Three beliefs that are sometimes in tension with one another infuse these pages. First, a massive amount of cruel racial injustice continues to beset the United States of America, an ugly reality that has become alarmingly obvious with the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump and the various political, cultural, and social pathologies that he and many of his followers display and reinforce. Second, there is much about which to be inspired when surveying the African American journey from slavery to freedom to engagement in practically every aspect of life in the United States. Third, an openness to complexity, paradox, and irony should attend any serious investigation of human affairs. Kennedy has tried to allow that sensibility ample leeway in the essays, prompting within himself surprise, ambivalence, and, on several occasions, a heartfelt need to express apology for prior oversights and mistaken judgments. Say It Loud! is nothing less than Randall Kennedy's magnum opus"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.