{"id":30738,"date":"2013-05-01T03:53:25","date_gmt":"2013-05-01T03:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30738"},"modified":"2013-05-01T03:53:25","modified_gmt":"2013-05-01T03:53:25","slug":"black-white-and-many-shades-of-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30738","title":{"rendered":"Black, White, and Many Shades of Gray"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black, White, and Many Shades of Gray<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Harvard Magazine<\/a>
\nMay-June 2013<\/a><\/p>\n

Craig Lambert<\/strong><\/p>\n

Randall Kennedy probes the \u201cvariousness\u201d of charged racial issues.<\/em><\/p>\n

In The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama<\/em>, David Remnick relates a story from Obama\u2019s<\/a> first year at Harvard Law School, when he registered for \u201cRace, Racism, and American Law,\u201d a course taught by Randall Kennedy<\/a>, now Klein professor of law. \u201cKennedy had caused some controversy, writing critically in The New Republic and elsewhere about some aspects of affirmative action,\u201d Remnick relates. \u201cAt the first class, Obama [J.D. \u201991] and [his friend Cassandra] Butts, [J.D. \u201991] watched as a predictable debate unfolded between black students who objected to Kennedy\u2019s critique and students on the right, almost all white, who embraced it. Obama feared a semester-long shout-fest. He dropped the course.\u201d Thus Kennedy never taught the future president, although he did instruct Michelle LaVaughn Robinson<\/a> [subsequently, Obama], J.D. \u201988, who also did research for him.<\/p>\n

A \u201csemester-long shout-fest\u201d may be hyperbolic, but Kennedy admits, \u201cYes, those classes were very contentious. I structured them that way.\u201d It wasn\u2019t hard: Kennedy, an African American himself, consistently introduced the kinds of racial issues\u2014such as \u201creverse discrimination\u201d against whites\u2014that explode like hand grenades in an interracial classroom. \u201cShould there be a right to a multiracial jury?\u201d he asks, smiling. \u201cBoom!\u201d<\/p>\n

Kennedy is \u201cthe kind of professor who thrives on iconoclasm, defying the embedded expectations of his students,\u201d according to one of them, Brad Berenson, J.D. \u201991, a member of the White House Counsel\u2019s Office under George W. Bush<\/a> and now a vice president of litigation and legal policy at General Electric. \u201cWhether this comes from Randy\u2019s convictions, or from playing devil\u2019s advocate, it makes him hard to pin down or characterize. He\u2019s a great example of the inquiring mind of an academic, someone who is willing to question dogmas and encourage his students to do the same.\u201d…<\/p>\n

… Two major themes run through Kennedy\u2019s work. The title of his 2011 book on racial politics and the Obama presidency, The Persistence of the Color Line<\/a><\/em>, summarizes the first. \u201cThe race question has been a deep issue in American life since the beginning and it continues to be a deep, volatile issue,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been most concerned about showing racial conflict as it affects the legal system, but you can also analyze how it manifests itself in literature, movies, patterns of dating and marriage, or housing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second theme is that much commentary on race \u201ccan be boiled down to two schools of thought: optimistic and pessimistic. The pessimistic school believes that \u2018We shall not<\/em> overcome\u2019\u2014racial animus and prejudice are so deeply embedded that they will never go away. Thomas Jefferson<\/a>, Abraham Lincoln<\/a>, and Malcolm X<\/a> fell into the pessimistic camp. The optimists, in contrast, feel that, notwithstanding the depth and horror of oppression, there are resources in American society that, deployed intelligently, will<\/em> allow us to overcome. I put myself in that camp, along with Frederick Douglass<\/a>, the great [nineteenth-century abolitionist] Wendell Phillips<\/a> [A.B. 1831, LL.B. 1833], and Martin Luther King<\/a>. I hope I don\u2019t turn away from the horror, but also hope I try to be attentive to the real fact of change in American life.\u201d …<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black, White, and Many Shades of Gray Harvard Magazine May-June 2013 Craig Lambert Randall Kennedy probes the \u201cvariousness\u201d of charged racial issues. In The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick relates a story from Obama\u2019s first year at Harvard Law School, when he registered for \u201cRace, Racism, and American Law,\u201d a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1467,8,394,20],"tags":[14581,2468,724],"class_list":["post-30738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-law","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-craig-lambert","tag-harvard-magazine","tag-randall-kennedy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}