Say It Loud!

1. Shall We Overcome?

Optimism and Pessimism in African American Racial Thought

Take courage . . . ye Afric-Americans! Don t give up the conflict, for the glorious prize can be won. Peter Osborne (1832)

In the quest for equality, black folks have tried everything. We ve begged, revolted, entertained, intermarried, and are still treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction and the American work ethic when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits? Paul Beatty (1996)
 
Within the diverse, always-changing spectrum of black American racial thought can be discerned two broad camps: the optimists and the pessimists those who believe that blacks are (or can become) members of the American family and those who believe that blacks will always be outsiders; those who predict that we shall overcome and those who conclude that we shall not.
 
I
 
The fight at the founding of what became the United States of America made blacks think about and act upon which outcome would offer a better future: a victory for the colonists with their libertarian rhetoric and entanglement with slavery, or a victory for the Crown, which was, in principle, indifferent to slavery but will­ing to free the colonists bondsmen as a war measure. story of blacks making common cause with the rebels, hoping to elicit a recognition of African American contributions to the nation s founding in order to gain better treatment. Consider William Nell s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution published in 1855. Nell sought to use the memory of Crispus Attucks and other blacks who fought with the rebels to obtain from whites some measure of respect for colored folks whose forebears had helped the colonies secure independence. It should therefore come as no surprise that Nell ignored the blacks who fled to and fought for the British. Pessimistic about their prospects in an America ruled by rebellious slaveholders,

Preface xi
 
1. Shall We Overcome? Optimism and Pessimism in African American Racial Thought 3
2. Derrick Bell and Me 31
3. The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril 77
4. Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste 84
5. The Princeton Ultimatum: Antiracism Gone Awry 93
6. How Black Students Brought the Constitution to Campus 103
7. Race and the Politics of Memorialization 112
8. The Politics of Black Respectability 123
9. Policing Racial Solidarity 138
10. Why Clarence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized 147
11. Say It Loud! On Racial Shame, Pride, Kinship, and Other Problems 155
12. The Struggle for Collective Naming 172
13. The Struggle for Personal Naming 196
14. Nigger : The Strange Career Continues 210
15. Should We Admire Nat Turner? 217
16. Frederick Douglass: Everyone s Hero 233
17. Anthony Burns and the Terrible Relevancy of the Fugitive Slave Act 240
18. Eric Foner and the Unfinished Mission of Reconstruction 255
19. Charles Hamilton Houston: The Lawyer as Social Engineer 272
20. Remembering Thurgood Marshall 284
21. Isaac Woodard and the Education of J. Waties Waring 321
22. J. Skelly Wright: Up from Racism 331
23. On Cussing Out White Liberals: The Case of Philip Elman 342
24. The Civil Rights Act Did Make a Difference! 352
25. Black Power Hagiography 368
26. The Constitutional Roots of Birtherism 390
27. Inequality and the Supreme Court 395
28. Brown as Senior Citizen 410
29. Racial Promised Lands? 425
 
Acknowledgments 449
Notes 451
Index 490

RANDALL KENNEDY is the author of six previous books. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He is a memberof the bar of the District of Columbia, of the American Law Institute, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Massachusetts.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR One of Library Journal s Titles to Watch
 
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.
        Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.
Kirkus Reviews