Background
Randall L. Kennedy was born on September 10, 1954, in Columbia, South Carolina, United States, to Henry Kennedy Sr., a postal worker, and Rachel Kennedy, an elementary school teacher.
Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Princeton University
Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Oxford University
New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Yale University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Harvard University Law School
Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Princeton University
Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Oxford University
New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Yale University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Harvard University Law School
(Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Pri...)
Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize "An original, wise and courageous work that moves beyond sterile arguments and lifts the discussion of race and justice to a new and more hopeful level."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another. "An admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest book."--New York Times Book Review "This book should be a standard for all law students."--Boston Globe
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375701842/?tag=2022091-20
(It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that w...)
It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it. Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves? With a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial, Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001O1O6JK/?tag=2022091-20
(In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision regard...)
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding Fisher v. University of Texas, For Discrimination is at once the definitive reckoning with one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues and a principled work of advocacy for clearly defined justice. What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor and author of such critically acclaimed and provocative books as Race, Crime, and the Law and the national best-seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, gives us a concise, gimlet-eyed, and deeply personal conspectus of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations. With pellucid reasoning, Kennedy accounts for the slipperiness of the term “affirmative action” as it has been appropriated by ideologues of every stripe; delves into the complex and surprising legal history of the policy; coolly analyzes key arguments pro and con advanced by the left and right, including the so-called color-blind, race-neutral challenge; critiques the impact of Supreme Court decisions on higher education; and ponders the future of affirmative action.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009C97328/?tag=2022091-20
(In this incisive and unflinching study, Randall Kennedy, ...)
In this incisive and unflinching study, Randall Kennedy, author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, tackles another stigma of America's racial discourse: “selling out.” He explains the origins of the concept and shows how fear of this label has haunted prominent members of the black community—including, most recently, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama. Sellout also contains a rigorously fair case study of America's quintessential racial “sellout”—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the book's final section, Kennedy recounts how he himself has dealt with accusations of being a sellout after meeting fierce criticism at Harvard upon the publication of his book, Nigger. From the Trade Paperback edition.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012E3JB0/?tag=2022091-20
(In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy hits a nerve a...)
In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy hits a nerve at the center of American society: race relations and our most intimate ties to each other. Writing with the same piercing intelligence he brought to his national bestseller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Kennedy here challenges us to examine how prejudices and biases still fuel fears and inform our sexual, marital, and family choices. Analyzing the tremendous changes in the history of America’s racial dynamics, Kennedy takes us from the injustices of the slave era up to present-day battles over race matching adoption policies, which seek to pair children with adults of the same race. He tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics, the historic role of legal institutions in policing racial boundaries, and the real and imagined pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy. A bracing, much-needed look at the way we have lived in the past, Interracial Intimacies is also a hopeful book, offering a potent vision of our future as a multiracial democracy.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008ZPFW14/?tag=2022091-20
(Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and contro...)
Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency. Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard professor of law and author of the New York Times best seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—gives us a keen and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency. Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors in its entire history. Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America. From the Hardcover edition.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004J4WL46/?tag=2022091-20
Randall L. Kennedy was born on September 10, 1954, in Columbia, South Carolina, United States, to Henry Kennedy Sr., a postal worker, and Rachel Kennedy, an elementary school teacher.
Kennedy graduated from the Princeton University as a Bachelor of Arts in 1977. He had graduate studies at the Oxford University for 2 years from 1977. Finally, Kennedy obtained his Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the Yale University 5 more years later.
Randall Kennedy began his legal career by clerking for two of the most eminent of recent American jurists, Judge Skelly Wright of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (from 1982 till 1983) and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the American Supreme Court (from 1983 till 1984). Immediately following his clerkships, in 1984, Kennedy became an assistant professor of law at the Harvard University law school, where he has been a professor of American Law since 1989. Through his writings and his teaching he has become, as Publishers Weekly noted in a review of his 1997 book Race, Crime, and the Law, “known for his nuanced views on racial issues”. Now he is also a Trustee of Princeton University.
In Race, Crime and the Law, Kennedy examines a number of important questions about justice and injustice as they bear upon African Americans in the United States at the close of the twentieth century. Among Kennedy’s topics are the selective use of race as grounds for suspicion by police; the discrepancy between whites and blacks in being sentenced to the death penalty; race as a determinant for jury selection and unequal prison sentences for blacks and whites.
(In this incisive and unflinching study, Randall Kennedy, ...)
(Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and contro...)
(In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy hits a nerve a...)
(It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that w...)
(In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision regard...)
(Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Pri...)
Kennedy is unafraid of tackling socially difficult issues, such as racism.
Kennedy married Yvedt Matory, they have 3 children - William Henry, Rachel and Thaddeus.
