Randall Kennedy
His research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life. He is the author of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption; Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word; Race, Crime, and the Law; and Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal. Additionally, Kennedy has published numerous collections of shorter works. Many of his articles can be found in periodicals and newspapers such as: The American Prospect and The Nation, where he also served on the editorial boards, as well as The Atlantic Monthly,Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard BlackLetter Journal, and The Boston Globe. His book Race, Crime, and the Law won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Kennedy on civil discourse, from “The Limits of Civility”:
Civility is only a provisional virtue. In the right circumstances, incivility can also be a virtue. Indeed, whenever I hear unqualified denunciations of “incivility,” derision of people who refuse to compromise, and annoyance with “radicals” I think of certain figures who are among those I most admire. I think of William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) the remarkable editor of The Liberator who condemned slavery as a sin and demanded its immediate abolition when most white Americans considered such views as either wildly utopian or viciously misguided. In furtherance of his marginalized and often dangerous abolitionist crusade, Garrison conducted himself in a fashion that contemporaries and historians have condemned as highly uncivil. At the end of some speeches, Garrison put a match to copies of the United States Constitution to dramatize his abhorrence of its compromise with Negro enslavement. He damned the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” and vilified those he perceived as enemies of abolitionism. In my view Garrison is one of the greats of American history. I admire his far-sighted detestation of slavery and colorphobia and admire, too, his willingness to offend deliberately the sensibilities of his contemporaries to make his point – an argument for the sanctity of human liberty that he pressed fearlessly, ruthlessly, dogmatically with commendable disregard for the ascendant conventions that constituted civility in his era.
