Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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Tag: Randall Kennedy

  • Passing is both a social and political act: a form of revolt against slave owners and slavery, outlawed and feared by segregationists and white supremacists, yielding a breath of freedom and yet systemically injurious to those still oppressed.

    Passing is both a social and political act: a form of revolt against slave owners and slavery, outlawed and feared by segregationists and white supremacists, yielding a breath of freedom and yet systemically injurious to those still oppressed. Because of this latter fact, it’s hard for me to work through how to perceive it morally,…

  • How Green Was My Surname; Via Ireland, a Chapter in the Story of Black America

    How Green Was My Surname; Via Ireland, a Chapter in the Story of Black America The New York Times 2003-03-17 S. Lee Jamison Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Shaquille O’Neal! So many African-Americans have Irish-sounding last names—Eddie Murphy, Isaac Hayes, Mariah Carey, Dizzy Gillespie, Toni Morrison, H. Carl McCall—that you would think that the long story…

  • Black, White, and Many Shades of Gray

    Black, White, and Many Shades of Gray Harvard Magazine May-June 2013 Craig Lambert Randall Kennedy probes the “variousness” of charged racial issues. In The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick relates a story from Obama’s first year at Harvard Law School, when he registered for “Race, Racism, and American Law,” a…

  • Hot Colors: Race, Sex, and Love

    Hot Colors: Race, Sex, and Love Harvard Magazine March-April 2003 Craig Lambert Tiger Woods, possibly the world’s best-known athlete, resists being called a “black” golfer. He coined the term “Cablinasian” (Caucasian, black, Indian, Asian) to identify his race, and used it on the Oprah Winfrey television show after winning the 1997 Masters tournament. Although Woods’s…

  • Among Blacks, Pride Is Mixed With Expectations for Obama

    Among Blacks, Pride Is Mixed With Expectations for Obama The New York Times 2013-01-20 Susan Saulny The Rev. Greggory L. Brown, a 59-year-old pastor of a small Lutheran church, committed himself to ministry and a life pursuing social justice on April 4, 1968 — the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain…

  • The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency

    The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency Random House, Inc. 2011-08-16 336 pages Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-37789-0 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-307-45555-0 Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law Harvard Law School Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial…

  • Whoa, We Have a Black President

    Whoa, We Have a Black President Zócalo: Public Square 2011-09-08 Randall Kennedy Assesses Obama’s Triumphs—and Shortcomings—In Erasing the Color Line Randall Kennedy, Harvard professor of law and author of The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, had an assignment: to answer whether or not Obama has been erasing the color…

  • Up Front: Brent Staples

    Up Front: Brent Staples Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2011-09-02 The Editors Brent Staples, who reviews Randall Kennedy’s “Persist­ence of the Color Line” in this issue, is working on a history of mixed-race identity in the United States. “One of the things that interested me in the last campaign,” Staples wrote in an…

  • The Too Black, Too White Presidency

    The Too Black, Too White Presidency The New York Times 2011-09-02 Brent Staples Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. 322 pp. The next time you see Barack Obama gliding into a White House press conference, take note of that jazzy walk. It…

  • Books of The Times: One Nation, Still Divisible by Race

    Books of The Times: One Nation, Still Divisible by Race The New York Times 2011-08-11 Dwight Garner Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. 322 pp. August is not half over, and already it’s been a punishing month for Barack Obama: the debt…