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The Politics of Racial Betrayal
Pantheon
January 2008
On Sale: January 8, 2008
240 pages
ISBN: 0375425438
EAN: 9780375425431
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In the wake of his controversial national best-seller,
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall
Kennedy grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another
stigma of our racial discourse: "selling out," or racial
betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in
Black America. He atomizes the vicissitudes of the term and
shows how its usage bedevils blacks and whites, while
elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our
society as a whole. Kennedy begins his exploration of selling out with a cogent,
historical definition of the "black" community, accounting
precisely for who is considered black and who is not. He
looks at the ways in which prominent members of that
community--Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama,
among others--have been stigmatized as sellouts. He outlines
the history of the suspicion of racial betrayal among
blacks, and he shows how current fears of selling out are
expressed in thought and practice. He offers a rigorous and
bracing case study of the quintessential "sellout"--Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most vilified
black public official in American history. And he gives is a
first-person reckoning of how he himself has dealt with
accusations of having sold out at Harvard, especially after
the publication of Nigger. Lucidly and powerfully articulated, Sellout is essential to
any discussion of the troubled history of race in America.
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