Randall Kennedy: Portrait of a Contrarian Black Intellectual

Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy has built a career defying expectations of what a black intellectual should be. Born in South Carolina during segregation, he attended predominantly white schools before joining Harvard Law School's faculty in 1984. His 1997 book "Race, Crime, and the Law" won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for denouncing the over-incarceration of black men, yet he controversially argued that some police discrimination could be "rational." In 2002, his book "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word" sparked outrage for its title and dispassionate analysis of the racial slur. He further alienated black peers by defending Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in "Sellout" (2008) and advocating for colorblind adoption in "Interracial Intimacies" (2003). Kennedy has been called a sellout and a conservative, but he identifies as a leftist intellectual writing for progressive outlets like The Nation and Dissent. His 2011 book "The Persistence of the Color Line" critiques Barack Obama's racial politics, marking a shift toward greater racial solidarity. In a 2012 C-SPAN interview, Kennedy confessed to internal conflict between his individualist past and a newfound sense of racial duty, calling himself "a race man in transition."