Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 4 reviews on
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - A collection of provocative essays exploring the key social justice issues of our time--from George Floyd to antiracism to inequality and the Supreme Court. Kennedy is "among the most incisive American commentators on race" (The New York Times).
Informed by sharpness of observation and often courting controversy, deep fellow feeling, decency, and wit, Say It Loud! includes:
The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril - Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste - The Princeton Ultimatum: Antiracism Gone Awry - The Constitutional Roots of "Birtherism" - Inequality and the Supreme Court - "Nigger" The Strange Career Continues - Frederick Douglass: Everyone's Hero - Remembering Thurgood Marshall - Why Clarence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized - The Politics of Black Respectability - Policing Racial Solidarity
In each essay, Kennedy is mindful of complexity, ambivalence, and paradox, and he is always stirring and enlightening. Say It Loud! is a wide-ranging summa of Randall Kennedy's thought on the realities and imaginaries of race in America.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker.
Monday at 4pm ET, I will be in a @HarvardBooks virtual conversation with Randall Kennedy on his magnum opus, 'Say it Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture'. I hope you will join us! Register: https://t.co/whnRzMTHA2 https://t.co/Fp5kAAqG7q
An independent radio show about ideas, ideas, and politics hosted by Christopher Lydon. Since 2003. Support us! https://t.co/lXdZoTAP7x
Tonight at 9, on @WBUR, hear Randall Kennedy on his book of essays SAY IT LOUD--on race, law, history, and culture.
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‘Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture’ by Randall Kennedy is a collection of twenty-nine essays that focus on major social justice issues of our era. Published by Pantheon. Visit the Bookstore or DM to purchase! @PantheonBooks #randallkennedy https://t.co/NwoYUFFn4W
"In these trenchant essays, Kennedy updates previously published pieces that survey hot-button issues and enduring controversies involving race and the law . . . [A] wide-ranging volume that stoutly defend[s] his centrist stance on race against excesses of the right and left . . . In a time of polarized racial politics, Kennedy's closely reasoned and humanely argued takes offer an appealing alternative."
--Publishers Weekly
"Kennedy observes that "social relations are complex and messy." Having lived through several eras, Kennedy calls himself a "Black/Negro/Colored/African American" man born in the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Some of the pieces are of a historical survey nature, [others] the author's denunciations of "antiracism gone awry" and small-step racial justice laws that "are attentive to the pluralism that infuses American practices."
"Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy's arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse."
--Kirkus Reviews