John S. Rosenberg of Minding The Campus has written a new essay which examines the career of Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy.

The Odd Career of Randall Kennedy

Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy probably deserves his own chapter in the history of black intellectuals and black legal scholars. Over the years he has told us a great deal — some of it intentionally, with scholarship and skill; some inadvertently or unwittingly –about how race is regarded and debated in the academy, especially the legal academy.

In his early writings, delivered with force and skill, he often surprised readers by departing from the analysis of his peers. For this he came under heavy fire, particularly from Derrick Bell, the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and one of the founders of critical race theory.

In 1998 Bell, a former mentor to Kennedy, wrote a bitterly critical renunciation of his former protege, “The Strange Career of Randall Kennedy,” in effect calling Kennedy an Uncle Tom for assuming the role of an “impartial black intellectual, … [a] self-appointed monitor of civil rights positions … ever ready to balance even the most heinous racial abuse with criticism of blacks when, in his view, our accusations condemning racism … go too far.” Kennedy, in Bell’s view, by then himself a law professor at Harvard, “forgot whose side he was on,” demonstrated by his willingness to take public positions that “serve to comfort many whites and distress blacks.”

Against the Grain

In his early career Kennedy did indeed perfect the persona of the open-minded, even fair and balanced liberal willing to write and speak against the grain of civil rights orthodoxy. In Race, Crime, and The Law (1998) and other writings he opposed the use of race to balance juries. In Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003) he defended interracial dating, marriage, and cross-racial adoption. In “My Race Problem — And Ours” (Atlantic Monthly, May 1997), he even came out against racial pride, racial loyalty, and racial identity itself, celebrating the unencumbered individual “freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status … installed as sovereign.”