Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture

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.