Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal

Randall Kennedy

$19.00

Publication Date: January 6th, 2009

Publisher:

Vintage

ISBN:

9780307388421

Pages:

240

Description

An incisive and unflinching study from the national bestselling author of Say it Loud! that tackles a stigma of America's racial discourse: selling out.

“Brisk and enjoyable, no small feat given the density of its ideas.”—Los Angeles Times

Randall Kennedy explains the origins of the concept of selling out, and shows how fear of this label has haunted prominent members of the black community—including, most recently, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama. Sellout also contains a rigorously fair case study of America's quintessential racial “sellout”—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the book's final section, Kennedy recounts how he himself has dealt with accusations of being a sellout.

About the Author

Randall Kennedy is the author of Interracial Intimacies, Nigger, and Race, Crime, and the Law. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. A Rhodes Scholar, he served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is a professor at Harvard Law School and lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Praise for Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal

“Sellout is brisk and enjoyable, no small feat given the density of its ideas. . . . Worth reading for the light it shines on many subtleties of black history.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Thought-provoking. . . . [Kennedy offers] illuminating evidence that, despite great marks of progress, race's stranglehold on the nation's collective conscious remains as strong as ever.”—The Washington Post

“Fresh. . . . Elegant and open-minded. . . . Sellout does a great deal to complicate the politics of racial betrayal.”—Salon.com

“A cool, clean case against the use of a backwards epithet that discourages something black America can hardly do without-coherent and original thought.”—The New York Sun