Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal
by Randall Kennedy
Summary
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.
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, and he offers a rigorous and bracing case study of the quintessential “sellout"--Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Lucidly and powerfully articulated, Sellout is essential to any discussion of the troubled history of race in America.
Excerpt
Chapter One: Who Is “Black”?
“How difficult it sometimes is to know where the black begins and the white ends.”
—Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901)
Soon after declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, Senator Barack Obama was asked on the television program 60 Minutes when he had “decided” that he was black.[1] One of the reasons the interviewer posed this question is that Obama’s mother was a white American and his father a black Kenyan. Obama, moreover, had had little contact with his father; he was raised mainly in Hawaii by his mother and her relatives, in settings far afield from conventional black American communities.[2] Against this backdrop, some observers have questioned Obama’s racial standing. “Obama isn’t black,” the journalist Debra J. Dickerson asserts, because “in our political and social reality [black] means those descended from West African slaves.” Rather, Dickerson continues, “by virtue of his white American mom and his Kenyan dad . . . [Obama] is an American of African immigrant extraction."[3][4]
Obama responded to the question on 60 Minutes by distancing himself from the idea that he had “decided” to be black. He focused on three other considerations: his appearance, the response of onlookers to his appearance, and his shared experience of those responses with others also perceived to be “black.” “[I]f you look African American in this society,” he remarked, “you’re treated as an African American."[5] In 1940, W. E. B. DuBois quipped that “the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia."[6] Obama updated that view, noting that when he tried to catch taxis, drivers were not confused about his race; they all too often refused to pick him up for racially discriminatory reasons, just as they all too often sped by other “black” men.
Discussion of Obama’s racial identity is a highly publicized instance of a feature of American race relations that is often ignored or misunderstood though it has deep historical roots. Many people believe that determining who is “black” is rather easy, a task simplified by the administration of the one-drop rule.[7] Under the one-drop rule, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as “black.” A principal purpose of this doctrine was to address “the problem” of children born of interracial sex who would bear a mixture of physical markers inherited from ancestors situated on different sides of the race line. White supremacists hoped that by definitively categorizing as “African,” “black,” “Negro,” or “colored” anyone whose appearance signaled the presence of an African ancestor, the one-drop rule would protect white bloodlines. It mirrored and stoked Negrophobia by proclaiming that even the tiniest dab of Negro ancestry was sufficiently contaminating to make a person a “nigger.” Many white racists have believed what a character exclaims in Thomas Dixon’s novel The Leopard’s Spots—that “a single drop” of Negro blood “kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions."[8][9]
Excerpted from Sellout by Randall Kennedy Copyright © 2008 by Randall Kennedy. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Reviews
“[C]hallenges conventional understanding of what exactly constitutes racial betrayal”—Peniel E. Joseph, The Washington Post
"A lively, thoughtful, provocative commentary on a centerpiece of black identity politics"—Publishers Weekly
“Kennedy examines the meaning of that expression ["sellout"] while considering how and why luminaries like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas have been branded for betraying their race”—Ann Burns, Library Journal
Author's Biography
Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University. He is a member of the bars of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Association. His book Race, Crime, and the Law won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.