Join renowned legal scholar Randall Kennedy for a discussion of the twentieth-anniversary edition of his acclaimed classic, “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”
VIRTUAL EVENT DETAILS
Friday February 11, 2022 7:00 PM ET
Harvard Book Store
Get Tickets: https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_randall_kennedy1/
About the Author:
Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is the author of Race, Crime, and the Law, a winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption; Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word; Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal; The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency; and For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law.
About the Book:
Nigger: It is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of “the ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience.” In this tour de force, distinguished Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy – author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law – “put[s] a tracer on nigger”, to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise.
With unprecedented candor and insight Kennedy explores such questions as: How should nigger be defined? Is it, as some have declared, necessarily more hurtful than other racial epithets? Do Blacks have a right to use nigger even as others do not? Should the law view nigger baiting as a provocation strong enough to reduce the culpability of a person who responds violently to it? Should a person be fired from his or her job for saying nigger? How might the destructiveness of nigger be assuaged?
To be ignorant of the meanings and effects of nigger, says Kennedy, is to render oneself vulnerable to all manner of peril. This book brilliantly and sensitively addresses that concern.
