Randall Kennedy Quotes
We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.
Kennedy, Randall. For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law. Pantheon Books, 2013.
It was not until this publication that people who suggested that discrimination and lack of education and opportunity might have something to do with the problem Blacks faced in society were regarded by many Americans as anything but left wing intellectuals.
Nixon, in his second attempt to win the Presidency was told by a small group of Southern Republican politicians that his support was wavering in the South. They had already left the Democratic Party in reaction to the Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were concerned because in order to try and capture some of the more liberal anti-war Democrats, Nixon had been making speeches advocating the vigerous enforcement of of civil rights and improving the lot of the Negro. But Nixon could not afford to lose his political base inb the south. Hence the promise which did not keep very long after he was elected President. Nixon was not a strong civil rights President, but he was totally without principles and had no political idiology he would sacrifice any of his political capital for. So once he was elected, he didn't want to offend the centerists whose support he needed for his legislatrive program so he did pay lip service to the prinicples of equality when he himself was anti-Black, andti-Semitic and prejudiced in many areas including against intelelctuals.
Randall LeRoy Kennedy is an American law professor and author at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law and his research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life. He specializes in contracts, freedom of expression, race relations law, civil rights legislation, and the Supreme Court.
