Sellout
The Politics of Racial Betrayal
By Randall Kennedy
(Pantheon, Hardcover, 9780375425431, 240pp.)
Publication Date: January 8, 2008
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
Categories: Discrimination & Racism, Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General, History & Theory - General
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In the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another stigma of our racial discourse: "selling out," or racial betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. He atomizes the vicissitudes of the term and shows how its usage bedevils blacks and whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole.
Kennedy begins his exploration of selling out with a cogent, historical definition of the "black" community, accounting precisely for who is considered black and who is not. He looks at the ways in which prominent members of that community--Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama, among others--have been stigmatized as sellouts. He outlines the history of the suspicion of racial betrayal among blacks, and he shows how current fears of selling out are expressed in thought and practice. He offers a rigorous and bracing case study of the quintessential "sellout"--Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most vilified black public official in American history. And he gives is a first-person reckoning of how he himself has dealt with accusations of having sold out at Harvard, especially after the publication of Nigger.
Lucidly and powerfully articulated, Sellout is essential to any discussion of the troubled history of race in America.
Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University. He is a member of the bars of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Association. His book Race, Crime, and the Law won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Praise for Randall Kennedy
Sellout
“Sellout is brisk and enjoyable, no small feat given the density of its ideas . . . Worth reading for the light it shines on many subtleties of black history.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Thought-provoking . . . [Kennedy offers] illuminating evidence that, despite great marks of progress, race’s stranglehold on the nation’s collective conscious remains as strong as ever.”
—The Washington Post
Nigger
"Provocative . . . Engaging and informative."
—The New York Times
"Kennedy's commitment to racial justice is plain . . . He frequently throws the cold water of common sense upon issues that are too often cloaked in glib histrionics."
—The New Republic
Race, Crime, and the Law
"Admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest."
—The New York Times Book Review
"[Kennedy] is doing the smartest work in the area of race."
—National Law Journal
Interracial Intimacies
"As definitive as it is defiant . . . One of the most important books on race in recent memory."
—The Columbus Dispatch
"We urgently need Kennedy, his courage and convictions . . . For some time [he] has been a member of that small coterie of our most lucid big thinkers about race."
—The Washington Post
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