The Trump presidency is not the end of the American story.
Randall Kennedy
Randall Kennedy has been a contributing editor of the Prospect since 1995. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University. His several books include The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency.
Posted inWorking in America
State-Enforced Segregation and the Color of Justice
Jim Crow was the descendant of Southern slavery. More shocking is the legacy of government-enforced racism in the North.
Posted inCivil Rights in America
The Case for Resistance
There is no common ground to be had with the Trump administration.
Posted inBooks
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Caricature of Black Reality
Ta-Nehisi Coates has written the race book of the year. Too bad it’s disempowering.
Posted inLaw and Justice
The Civil Rights Movement and the Politics of Memory
As opportunists try to hijack the movement’s legacy, let’s remember what actually occurred.
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Black America’s Promised Land: Why I Am Still a Racial Optimist
Hope and pessimism have defined two traditions of American thinking about race. Fully acknowledging recent setbacks, the author makes the case for the tradition of hope.
Posted inBooks
Imagining Malcolm X
Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X is a significant and poignant cultural event because of its subject, its purpose, and the recent tragic death of its author, the founder of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. Marable worked on this biography for more than two decades, struggling in recent years with […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Race Talk in the Obama Era
The paradoxical reticence of America’s first black president and how progressives must fill the vacuum
Posted in20th Anniversary
The Enduring Relevance of Affirmative Action
When diversity became a positive, race-based preferences overcame the backlash.
Posted inFeatures
Affirmative Reaction
In racial matters, good news from the Supreme Court is generally no news. Since at least the mid-1970s, the Court has been mostly inhospitable to those seeking to advance progressive racial policies through litigation. That is why civil-rights activists often deliberately keep potentially far-reaching cases away from the High Court. In a revealing episode in […]