Kennedy, Randall

Professor at Harvard Law School; author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Race, Crime, and the Law, and other books on race and American law

Randall Kennedy: The N-Word - History of Race, Law, Politics, and Power

Lex Fridman Podcast · May 24, 2023

• Randall Kennedy
• history of racial slurs
• teaching the n-word
• critical race theory debate
• policing and racial profiling
• affirmative action justifications
• meritocracy and Michael Sandel
• DEI and academic freedom
• optimist versus pessimist views of race relations
• Thurgood Marshall

Core ideas

Kennedy traces the word "nigger" to 16th–17th century Latin- and Spanish-derived roots, noting historians are not entirely certain how or when it crystallized into a slur, though it was clearly established as derogatory by the early 19th century; he argues it has since become uniquely potent among slurs — in his own review of federal court cases, it appeared far more often than comparable ethnic slurs — a fact he attributes to the singular centrality of the color line in American history. Reflecting on the twenty years since publishing his book, he describes an unanticipated pattern of teachers being suspended or fired for using the word pedagogically (e.g., discussing its 200-plus appearances in Huckleberry Finn, or reading it aloud from a court opinion), which he considers "stupid" and has actively opposed in letters to administrators, distinguishing this from actual misconduct (a teacher directing the slur at a student). He argues the word's history has to be taught precisely because of, not despite, its power — citing its use in the "soundtrack of racial terrorism" alongside its very different reclaimed uses by figures like Dick Gregory (whose memoir is titled Nigger), Richard Pryor, and James Baldwin (whose famous quote, he notes, is commonly and inaccurately softened in documentary titles to "I Am Not Your Negro" rather than the word Baldwin actually used).

On who may use the word and when, Kennedy states his position is not that it should never be spoken, but that the underlying question is whether it's being used to demean, intimidate, or terrorize — a standard he says applies regardless of the speaker's race, citing examples of Black people using the word to bully other Black people as equally objectionable. He defends the propriety of a white history professor quoting a segregationist politician's use of the word in a lecture on American racism, and of white comedians deploying it in satire, while being candid that some critics — including an elderly Black bookstore patron who told him directly he remained "unconvinced" — have argued the book risks being read as "giving permission" to use the word, a critique Kennedy says he takes seriously rather than dismisses. He draws a sociological distinction between "nigger" and "nigga" (arguing most people who object to the former are not mollified by the latter) and a sharper distinction between both and "negro," noting he still uses "negro" deliberately, in his own voice, partly because his former boss Thurgood Marshall required him to capitalize and use the term as a young lawyer in 1983. He opposes any technological effort to automatically blank or censor the word (which would strip it from works by Baldwin, Morrison, Malcolm X, and King), arguing instead for education that equips people to encounter difficult symbols (the word, or the swastika) without being traumatized, and separately argues for distinguishing "justifiably hurt feelings" (which should prompt an apology) from unjustified hurt (his example: a Klansman claiming offense at a lecture praising Martin Luther King Jr.).

On campus speech, Kennedy states he has been well-supported personally at Harvard but voices concern about broader trends: mandatory DEI statements in hiring and promotion (which he says function as an ideological litmus test he'd equally object to if the required ideology were, say, "advancement of American capitalism"), and unfamiliar-to-him "positionality statements" required for some journal submissions. On critical race theory, he draws a sharp distinction between the term as a political "boogeyman" invented mainly by Republican politicians to justify state laws banning its teaching (which he calls a "frightening encroachment" on free speech and academic freedom) and critical race theory as an actual body of legal scholarship from the 1980s (associated with Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Charles Lawrence, Richard Delgado, and Mari Matsuda) whose core claim — that American racism is more deeply embedded than liberal reformers acknowledged — he considers largely correct, while explicitly rejecting Bell's thesis of the "permanence" of white supremacy (citing a Black president as evidence of substantial, not merely cosmetic, change) and criticizing what he sees as some critical race theorists' openness to using state power to suppress "hate speech," which he opposes on free-expression grounds.

On policing, Kennedy frames his 1997 book Race, Crime, and the Law around two distinct harms he says Black Americans have suffered historically and still suffer: "under-protection" (citing the absence of legal recourse for crimes against Black victims during slavery, the lack of prosecution during the lynching era, and continued higher victimization rates today) and discriminatory policing (describing his own observation of visible police contempt directed at young Black men in Harlem during the stop-and-frisk era, and a New York federal court's factual findings of men stopped repeatedly without cause). He states explicitly that he does not support defunding the police, wants officers better paid and more respected given the difficulty of their work, but argues American law fails badly at holding police accountable and criticizes conservative colleagues (naming Heather Mac Donald as an example in a debate) for what he sees as inconsistently applying their own stated principles of limited government and transparency when it comes to policing. On racial profiling, he acknowledges that crime statistics can show differential group risk but argues that empowering state agents to act on race anyway imposes an unequal "tax" that should instead be spread across everyone (using post-9/11 airport screening of Muslims as an analogous case), arguing this reflects the principle that all people are created equal even at some cost to short-term efficiency.

On affirmative action, Kennedy lays out three justifications he's encountered — reparative justice (repairing effects of past discrimination, which he considers historically the primary driver even though courts have rejected it as a legal basis), distributive justice ("a campus that looks like America"), and diversity/pedagogical benefit (which he is skeptical is the true underlying motivation in most cases, given the absence of comparable outreach to other underrepresented groups) — and acknowledges real costs, including stigma (illustrating with a personal account of quietly thanking a Black classmate for a strong answer in a mostly-white law school class) and resentment among rejected applicants, while ultimately judging that the benefits outweigh these burdens. He pushes back on what he calls "denialism" in some pro-affirmative-action arguments (insisting there's no real academic gap between beneficiaries and other admits) as counterproductive, and separately engages critic Michael Sandel's critique of meritocracy, agreeing that luck (health, upbringing) deserves humility but disagreeing with what he sees as Sandel's discomfort with celebrating excellence itself. Asked about his own outlook, Kennedy identifies as historically part of the "optimist" camp on American race relations (in the lineage of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., versus a "pessimist" camp he traces through Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln — noting Lincoln's own support for Black colonization — and his own father, a Jim Crow-era refugee who held that America was "born a white man's country" and remained so), and states that recent years have "dampened" but not eliminated his optimism, citing both continued real racism and what he considers genuine, non-cosmetic progress (a Black U.S. president, vice president, and secretary of defense) as two simultaneously true stories he finds difficult to reconcile.

Excerpts