Virtual Event: Randall Kennedy

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University welcome renowned legal scholar RANDALL KENNEDY for a discussion of his latest book, Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture. He will be joined in conversation by celebrated historian HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., creator and host of the Emmy Award–winning docuseries Finding Your Roots, and author of Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow.

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About Say It Loud!

In a magnum opus that spans two decades, Harvard Law School professor Randall Ken­nedy, one of our preeminent legal scholars and public intellectuals, gives us twenty-nine provocative essays—some previously published, others written for this occasion—that explore key social justice issues of our time.

Informed by sharpness of observation and often courting controversy, deep fellow feeling, decency, and wit, Say It Loud! includes:

The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril • Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste • The Princeton Ultimatum: Anti­racism Gone Awry • The Constitutional Roots of “Birtherism” • Inequality and the Supreme Court • “Nigger”: The Strange Career Contin­ues • Frederick Douglass: Everyone’s Hero • Remembering Thurgood Marshall • Why Clarence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized • The Politics of Black Respectability • Policing Racial Solidarity

In each essay, Kennedy is mindful of com­plexity, ambivalence, and paradox, and he is always stirring and enlightening. Say It Loud! is a wide-ranging summa of Randall Kennedy’s thought on the realities and imaginaries of race in America.

Praise for Say It Loud! 

“In these trenchant essays, Kennedy updates previously published pieces that survey hot-button issues and enduring controversies involving race and the law . . .  [A] wide-ranging volume that stoutly defend[s] his centrist stance on race against excesses of the right and left . . . In a time of polarized racial politics, Kennedy’s closely reasoned and humanely argued takes offer an appealing alternative." —Publishers Weekly

“Kennedy observes that 'social relations are complex and messy.' 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. Some of the pieces are of a historical survey nature, [others] the author’s denunciations of 'antiracism gone awry' and small-step racial justice laws that 'are attentive to the pluralism that infuses American practices.'" —Kirkus Reviews