Randall Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, presents 29 essays on race in the United States in Say It Loud! My favorite essay is “Why Clarence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized.” Kennedy criticizes Clarence Thomas and his performance on the Supreme Court over 30 years. The recent revelations of Clarence Thomas and his wife getting millions of dollars of free trips from a conservative billionaire doesn’t help matters. The same with Justice Samuel Alito. This week’s Supreme Court rulings striking down Affirmative Action and debt relief for students just shows how out-of-touch the six conservative Justices are.
The strength of Say It Loud! focuses on various civil rights leaders who moved the nation and motivated change. I learned more about Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall. But Kennedy doesn’t stop there; he writes about other, less famous, figures in the civil rights struggle like Anthony Burns, Eric Foner, Charles Hamilton Houston, Isaac Woodard, J. Waties Waring, and J. Skelly Wright.
I found Say It Loud! informative and compelling. Racial issues need to be addressed. Trump exacerbated the tensions among races in the United States. We need to work together to change the precipitous course our country is on. What do you think? GRADE: A
Table of Contents:
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
” Trump exacerbated the tensions among races in the United States. ”
Actually, Chump just flipped the “GO CRAZY” switch,.
Dan, I was shocked that Trump ally Lindsey Graham was booed for SIX MINUTES in South Carolina at a Trump event. Tough crowd.
I’ve said before that Trump merely rode in on the wave that started way back in 1968 when Nixon pursued his “Southern Strategy” to the White House, followed in 1980 by Reagan’s courting of white evangelicals, exacerbated by the following decades of phony and misplaced aggrieved entitlement stoked by talk radio and Fox News. The fact that Clarence Thomas, who entered Harvard because of affirmative action and who’s lifestyle has been largely subsidized by a billionaire’s largesse, now voted with a complete lack of awareness of the cognitive dissonance for the end of affirmative action and student loan forgiveness is beyond appalling. The Supreme Court as currently constituted is an illegitimate right-wing propaganda machine ready to reverse decades of social/racial progress on the flimsiest pretexts (I mean, they recently used a case that essentially didn’t even have a plaintiff to overturn LGBTQI rights!). Unfortunately, because people like Thomas and Alito have no shame, they won’t resign or recuse themselves now it’s public knowledge that they’re puppets for wealthy supporters (some with a fascination with Nazis, ugh); they don’t care about anything but setting our country’s laws back to the 19th century. Take it from your resident Cassandra my friends, everything we thought was settled—from voting rights to contraception & reproductive rights to public school desegregation—is on the chopping block. Dark, dark days ahead. As the saying goes, “It’s not too late to lose the Civil War.”
/Dismounting soapbox now!
Deb, you are so right! All our rights are on the Supreme Court’s docket. Now that abortion rights, affirmative action, and the right to service from a business (that phony web designer case was purely hypothetical yet it revoked the right to served), what other rights are targeted to be eliminated…
Amen, sister!
What you said.
Well, thank goodness Biden is refusing to consider enlarging the court. While, with far less attention paid, allowing crude megatrain transport along the Colorado River, which Mayor Pete is hoping to provide tax-incentives for. https://www.levernews.com/biden-admin-boosts-big-oils-colorado-river-scheme/
Every time I think neoliberals have learned a lesson, they prove me wrong in every suit in the deck.
Phelps is preaching to the choir here. And Cassandra Deb is, as always, spot on.
From the time he lied to Congress to get his Supreme Court appointment, nothing Clarence Thomas has said or done hashad any legitimacy for me. The Republican power elite has a habit of nominating light-weights they can comtrol to the Court, completely ignoroing that the Supreme Court is supposed to be a bulwark for our democracy. Every time I think we’ve hit bottom, I find find there’s another bottom below.
Jerry, Roberts claimed he was only going to “call balls and strikes” as a Supreme Court Justice. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all lied in their Senate hearings when they declared they believed in precedent and would protect rights. But, once those three Trump appointees got on the Supreme Court, they over-turned ROE–which worked for 50 years. And now they gutted Affirmative Action, another program that has helped students for nearly 50 years. And, the cherry on the top of this mess: no student debt relief. Disastrous opinions!
And my distaste for Biden really began in his excruciatingly inept chairing of the Thomas appointment hearings.
Todd, you’re right about the terrible hearings on Clarence Thomas that Biden botched. He and his committee should have listened to Anita Hill.
Too busy being smarmy boy’s-clubbers.
Kennedy, not Phelps. I don’t know where my brain is today.
Jerry you brain is already on a 4th of July vacation!
Not far down the road: overturning child labor laws and eviscerating Medicaid. The push on putting teens under 16 back to work in factories has already begun. Dismantling Medicare and Social Security to follow. Nixon and Reagan started the destruction with “law and order” and “welfare queens,” but the Tea Party and Trump pushed the Race ball so far down the hill that we’ll never recover. I can’t exonerate the Dems either, with Bill Clinton’s specious “welfare reform” and Hilary’s dismal campaign in 2016. The SC is lost for the next 20 years at least, not even counting further GOP gains sure to follow if Trump returns to the WH in 2025.
Fred, the Super Majority on the Supreme Court is likely to last for at least a decade. That gives them plenty of time to reverse legislation so we go back to the 1950s.
There is nothing worse than a person profiting through legislation wanting no one else to share in it. Is it self-hate? Does he really believe he clawed his way up on his own merits and hard work. Term limits on the Court is our only hope-other than enlargement.
Patti, power corrupts and absolute power and absolute power–like the kind the Supreme Court Justices enjoy–corrupts absolutely.
And, Patti, yes, he actually does.
Malignant narcssism is rampant in most if not all power-seekers.
Todd, when rampant malignant narcissism is mixed with a Life-time Appointment, nothing Good can come from it.
Aw. c’mon, man! He saved us from Hitlery!
From far away Europe I watch the situarion in US politics with horrorIBut of course we have similar developments in parts of Europe – even Germany which should know better.
In parts of Eastern Germany the extreme right wing AfD (I call them: Allw Faschsisten Deutschlands, should be easy to translate) has become the strongest party!
And other European countries have had similar developments re LGBTQ rights and womens’ rights especially.
So is the whole world developing backwards in time?
Wolf, there’s no doubt chaos is spreading in the U.S. These latest Supreme Court rulings only exacerbate the political division. The riots in France, the military actions in the Middle East, the tension in the Taiwan Strait all point to dangerous times ahead.