Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture - Hardcover

Kennedy, Randall

 
9780593316047: Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593316045 ISBN 13: 9780593316047
Verlag: Pantheon, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RANDALL KENNEDY is the author of six previous books. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He is a memberof the bar of the District of Columbia, of the American Law Institute, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Massachusetts.

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1. Shall We Overcome?

Optimism and Pessimism in African American Racial Thought

Take courage . . . ye Afric-Americans! Don’t give up the conflict, for the glorious prize can be won. —Peter Osborne (1832)

In the quest for equality, black folks have tried everything. We’ve begged, revolted, entertained, intermarried, and are still treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction and the American work ethic when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits?—Paul Beatty (1996)
 
Within the diverse, always-changing spectrum of black American racial thought can be discerned two broad camps: the optimists and the pessimists—those who believe that blacks are (or can become) members of the American family and those who believe that blacks will always be outsiders; those who predict that we shall overcome and those who conclude that we shall not.
 
I
 
The fight at the founding of what became the United States of America made blacks think about and act upon which outcome would offer a better future: a victory for the colonists with their libertarian rhetoric and entanglement with slavery, or a victory for the Crown, which was, in principle, indifferent to slavery but will­ing to free the colonists’ bondsmen as a war measure. story of blacks making common cause with the rebels, hoping to elicit a recognition of African American contributions to the nation’s founding in order to gain better treatment. Consider William Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution published in 1855. Nell sought to use the memory of Crispus Attucks and other blacks who fought with the rebels to obtain from whites some measure of respect for colored folks whose forebears had helped the colonies secure independence. It should therefore come as no surprise that Nell ignored the blacks who fled to and fought for the British. Pessimistic about their prospects in an America ruled by rebellious slaveholders, many slaves deserted their masters, including some of the most eminent of the Found­ing Fathers. Slaves fled George Washington and Thomas Jeffer­son, as well as James Madison and Patrick Henry.
 
The British offered freedom to slaves who took up arms for King George. About fifteen thousand did so, while about twenty thousand fought alongside the colonists. One who joined the Brit­ish was a New Jerseyan named Titus. When he learned in 1775 of the British proclamation promising freedom in exchange for assistance in quashing the rebellion, Titus headed south to seek liberation. Three years later he returned to New Jersey, bearing the name Colonel Tye and leading a band of fighters who struck fear into the ranks of rebel colonists. We know little about Col­onel Tye’s motivations. It is certainly plausible, however, that a driving factor was outrage at people like Thomas Jefferson who championed “freedom” while simultaneously endorsing legisla­tion to provide slaves as compensation to colonial rebel soldiers.
 
After the Revolution, several observers concluded that Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans would never be able to coexist as equals. Thomas Jefferson held this view, declaring, “The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” Asked why he disfavored efforts to incorporate blacks into the polity, Jef­ferson answered,
 
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
 
Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction was similarly bleak. In Democracy in America he forecast that the racial oppression of blacks would remain a salient feature of American society even after the abolition of slavery. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere.” Why this distinction? In America, he observed, “the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color. The tradi­tion of slavery dishonors the race, and the peculiarity of the race perpetuates the tradition of slavery.” Tocqueville believed that slavery had forever poisoned relations between black and white. “You set the Negro free,” he writes, “but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European.” Furthermore, he main­tained that the baleful effects of slavery would persist not only in the South (where slavery was most deeply entrenched), and not only in the Northeast (where abolition gradually prevailed in the three decades prior to Tocqueville’s visit), but also in those areas of the country where slavery had never taken root:
 
Slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable. . . . [I]n those parts of the Union in which the Negroes are no longer slaves they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.
 
An important institutional manifestation of such pessimism was the American Colonization Society (ACS), which sought to send free blacks to Africa. The ACS included among its members scores of prominent figures including James Monroe, Bushrod Washington, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Daniel Web­ster, and Henry Clay. Most members of the ACS were support­ers of slavery and viewed free blacks as negative role models. A few, however, were genuinely sympathetic to free blacks. They championed colonization in part because they hoped it would put blacks beyond the deadening grip of antagonistic whites. In Africa they could rule themselves.
 
Swayed by this prospect of self-rule, some free blacks were initially drawn to colonization. Its attractiveness waned, however, when free blacks became further acquainted with Negrophobes such as Henry Clay who maintained approvingly that coloniza­tion would “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous, portion of its population.” After learning more about the ACS, free blacks turned against it en masse, asserting their rootedness in and fidelity to the United States.
 
A few blacks, however, continued to support colonization. Among them was the remarkable Paul Cuffe. A sea captain, abolitionist, and businessman, Cuffe wanted blacks to return to Africa because he thought that they would never “rise to be a people” until they had their own nation. Another black colo­nizationist was Newport Gardner, a former slave who had luck­ily been able to purchase freedom for himself, his wife, and his children. Gardner lived a charmed life for an African American in the early days of the nation, supporting himself from money he earned through music lessons and royalties from musical compo­sitions. He was an officer in the Free African Union Society and a sexton of the First Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island. Still, in 1826, at the age of eighty, Gardner felt impelled to immigrate to Liberia, accompanied by two dozen black Rhode Islanders including one of his sons. “I go,” he remarked as he boarded a ship, “to set an example to the youth of my race. . . . They can never be elevated...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593316045
ISBN 13 
9780593316047
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
528
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

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