I have written about enigmatic Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy several times over the years: The Inscrutable Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy: Still Inscrutable, Harvard’s Randall Kennedy: Still Inscrutable. And I’ve just done so again, in an essay on Minding The Campus: The Odd Career of Randall Kennedy.
Randall Kennedy could serve as a poster boy for affirmative action, both pro and con. (No, that is not a racial slur. Even though at just shy of sixty Kennedy is definitely not a boy, “poster man” does not work.)
Educated at Princeton, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and Yale Law School and the author of many articles and several highly regarded books on race in America, Kennedy no doubt would have been successful — probably as successful as he has been — even without the affirmative action boosts he acknowledges receiving at several turns along his career path. His success shows that affirmative action can on occasion pick winners, but also that those winners have to live with the knowledge that they received benefits denied to others because of their race. It is thus a success that will always be regarded with an asterisk in the minds of many observers, most of whom are not themselves racist.
Even more than living a life in affirmative action, however, what Kennedy has written about it over the years tells 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. The publication last month of Kennedy’s most recent book, For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law, provides an ideal opportunity to review that debate.
I review the book, and to a certain extent the contorted history of Kennedy’s contribution to it, in the Minding The Campus essay linked above.
ADDENDUM (7 October)
Here’s an important point I did not make as explicitly as I should have in my review.
A real virtue of this book, something that perhaps justifies regarding it as an important contribution to the ongoing debate over race preferences, is that it explicitly and even emphatically confirms something I’ve been arguing on this blog and elsewhere for years: that consistent and even coherent support for affirmative action as it is currently practiced requires abandoning both the policy and principle of non-discrimination along with the fundamental core value of treating everyone “without regard” to race, creed, or color from which that principle and policy derive.
ADDENDUM (8 October)
See Additional Thoughts On Randall Kennedy, Equal Opportunity Discriminator, which I was going to include here but then decided to offer as a separate post.
