George Simian, courtesy Harvard Law School

Each spring, the Harvard Black Law Students Association hosts a conference in which black alumni return to share their experiences since graduation. Invariably, writes Randall Kennedy ’77, a Harvard law professor, the older alumni exhort students to avoid “forgetting where you came from,” to “give back,” and to “stay black.” Some of the speakers insist that these soon-to-be lawyers forgo bond work and big-firm salaries, eschew middle-class comfort, and dedicate their careers to helping less fortunate African-Americans share the benefits they have enjoyed.

Kennedy looks on skeptically, and believes that many of the black law students do, too.

“Most people in the audience silently dismiss the demand for maximalist sacrifice,” Kennedy, who is African-American, writes in his new book, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (Princeton University Press). “They have come to Harvard because they want to enhance their upward mobility.” Like their white classmates, many of the black students want to pursue high-paying careers at powerhouse law firms, not jobs where they would work on behalf of the underprivileged. But the black students often join the big firms apologetically. 

“I tell my students that they should not permit an inflated conception of racial obligation to weigh them down,” Kennedy says. “I tell them that they should pursue happiness untrammeled by excessive racial dues. I tell them that if civil rights law or some similar enterprise is their passion, then they should certainly pursue it — not as an exercise in martyrdom, but as a fulfilling expression of what they most want to do with their talents.”

It might not seem an exceptional sentiment to say that people should be free to follow their passions, but if the choice is framed as one of putting loyalty to self ahead of solidarity with one’s race, it stirs more than a little controversy. African-Americans who are thought to turn their backs on their brethren are sometimes branded “sellouts,” Kennedy says. He himself has been called one — and, not surprisingly, he rejects the label. He studies this explosive issue in his latest book, exploring the idea of selling out one’s race by beginning with the provocative question: “Who is black?”  Over the next 194 pages, he ranges from an examination of Barack Obama’s ability to “choose” to be an African-American, to a defense of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas against charges of race betrayal. 

The subjects should come as no surprise from an author whose previous books have taken on such charged topics as the treatment of African-Americans in the criminal-justice system (Race, Crime, and the Law, 1997) and interracial marriage (Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, 2003). In his most famous and controversial book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon 2002), Kennedy meticulously dissected an epithet that cannot even be uttered in polite company.

Any good scholar is unafraid to confront the unconfrontable, while any good lawyer can wade against the conventional wisdom to argue a case wherever it may lead. But if race is one of the third rails of American social discourse, to be avoided altogether or approached with extreme delicacy, Kennedy not only touches the rail, he seems to grab it with both hands.

Kennedy is no polemicist, however; his books have been praised for their original, even-handed, and scholarly treatment of controversial subjects. The professor “frequently throws the cold water of common sense upon issues that are too often cloaked in glib histrionics,” wrote The New Republic. Historian Arthur Schlesinger called Race, Crime, and the Law “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.”

“It’s so standard Randy,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. *97, the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and the Center for African American Studies, says of Sellout. “He has this wonderful and provocative voice that is so important to forcing a vibrant conversation.”

But Kennedy’s work also draws criticism, much of it from other African-American scholars and much of it directed at his attempts to criticize blacks and excuse whites when he thinks they deserve it. Glen Ford, co-publisher of the online journal The Black Commentator, has scorned Kennedy as “a specialist in telling white people exactly what he thinks they want to hear.” Reviewing Sellout in The New York Times, Jill Nelson called some of Kennedy’s ideas, such as his suggestion that some slaves may have had legitimate reasons for warning their masters of planned uprisings, “deeply disturbing.” In a 1998 article titled “The Strange Career of Randall Kennedy,” Derrick Bell, formerly Kennedy’s colleague at Harvard, cried, “Come home, Randy! We advocates of racial justice need you on our side, not in our way.” 

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton, chooses her words carefully when assessing Kennedy’s work. Though she respects his scholarship, she is troubled by some of Kennedy’s suggestions, such as one in Race, Crime, and the Law that the incarceration of black lawbreakers actually might benefit the broader black community because its members are disproportionately the victims of violent crime. “It’s not that I perceive Randall as a sellout,” she explains, “but it’s not brave to attack marginalized people.” 

None of this criticism, Kennedy says, bothers him in the least. “There are other people ... who have had tough things to say about me, and my feeling is, no hard feelings,” he insists. “Life goes on. I have tremendous respect for my fellow ... professors, including those who have been extremely critical.”

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