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

I heard Professor Kennedy on an NPR program. I was so impressed by what he had to say about race, racism, and antiracism that I had my local library track down a copy of _Say_It_Loud_. I was equally impressed by the book. Here is a man who knows what he is talking about and has useful answers about a way forward. He acknowledges how complex the issues are. He cuts right through jingoism, semantics, and overly-simplified knee-jerk positions. He is honest about his own past errors. He gives fair treatment to views with which he disagrees.Because this book is a collection of essays, one needn't feel compelled to read them all, though I did. Sometimes the essays repeat each other, but only in brief passages.Be warned, Professor Kennedy's pragmatic, well-reasoned approach, will probably anger both those people who are intensely-progressive idealists and conservatives who appreciate Clarence Thomas.

This book has it all! Alot of research went between these covers. Provided many different views and justified or challenged all of them. Worth every penny!

Every American needs to read this book. We learn about American history and slavery and a few words about the Jim Crow era, but we don't learn about how our society has treated the descendants of slaves since the end of slavery. Extremely well written and interesting. What we do not know about this subject, even with college degrees, is astounding. Read this book.

If you want honesty about racial issues in America, this is the one book to read. Randall Kennedy is not just a brilliant scholar, but he is honest to a fault. His book will disturb ideologues on race, but they should be the first to read his insights.

Admittedly, I went into this book with far different expectations than I should have, in that since the title of the book references the James Brown song "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," that it would be a spirited, accessible, punch-y read about the civil rights movement, but instead it was so much more. It covers The George Floyd Movement, the 2020 Election, Racial Caste, Birtherism, the N-word, Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall, Black Respectability, and so many other topics and in such thought-provoking and even sometimes daring and controversial ways. As other reviewers have already noted, Say It Loud is written by a law professor, and it definitely reads like one. It doesn't feel like it was written for people outside of his classroom and his profession. It really does read like it was really more for law students, fellow law professors, and lawyers than the average reader who's none of those things. It's readable and accessible, though, probably more (and intentionally) so than what you would read in law school, but it does suffer from feeling like its a chore to read or like this was meant to be a textbook for law students so it's like you're reading someone else's homework, which isn't always that fun. It's touch-and-go in that regard though, some essays you can power through because it was so insightful, interesting, and well-written, and then others there's that lawyerly distance going on that stops you at your tracks, and being how inconsistent it is, reading Say It Loud can sometimes feel uneven and tedious. This, however, does not take away from this book being an important text! It's just not one that may be suited for everyone's taste, but there's plenty to take-away from it that makes this work worth it.