Under the Skin

Growing up in Washington, D.C., decades before his career as a scholar on race and the law began, Randall Kennedy had an experience common to black children in America: He got into a schoolyard fight over his race. "A white boy called me 'nigger,"' Kennedy recalls in his cluttered office at Harvard University. Henry Kennedy told his son he'd done the right thing and gave him permission to retaliate for the slur, unless he was outnumbered - in that case, get your hat. But his mom, Rachel, who, like his father, grew up in the Jim Crow South, was incredulous: " 'That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. That is completely stupid.'" He could get hurt or kicked out of school, she told him. Stick and stones - just ignore the bigots.

Leaning forward in his chair, a picture of Thurgood Marshall on the wall to his right, Kennedy asks the rhetorical question that could just as easily frame his work studying the black-white racial divide: "So, was my father's advice any more 'black' than my mother's advice? Was it any better than my mother's advice?"

Kennedy no longer takes instant offense to that most volatile word - depending on the context - and his role in the debate over its use has come to overshadow his career. In 2002, he wrote the best-selling book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troubled Word, an unflinching 142-page bombshell tracing the word's complex roots. Since then, he has appeared as an expert witness about the word and its interpretations in about a half-dozen court cases, none of them criminal trials - until this spring, when he testified for a white man in Queens, New York, charged with a hate crime for screaming the N-word while beating a black man with a bat. Lawyers for Nicholas "Fat Nick" Minucci persuaded Kennedy to help support their theory that Minucci, influenced by the word's repeated use in rap music and among African-Americans, didn't believe it was a heinous insult. Minucci was convicted and is serving 15 years.

Trim in jeans and a polo shirt, with a packed gym bag by his desk, Kennedy, 52, looks more like an aging tennis pro than a top law professor. But there's no question he's a brilliant legal thinker, with credentials any jurist might envy: Princeton University graduate, editor with the Yale Law Journal, Rhodes scholar, tenured Harvard Law professor since 1989. Born in segregated South Carolina at the cusp of the civil rights movement, he dreamed of becoming a civil rights attorney, and his career path included work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a clerkship for Marshall, the first African-American to sit on the US Supreme Court.

Yet some in the black community have labeled him everything from an opportunistic provocateur to a race traitor for his opinions in three books examining race and the law, his willingness to criticize civil rights orthodoxy, and his philosophical the-white-man-has-a-point perspective. Although he believes America is what he calls a "pigmentocracy" that has subjugated black people, Kennedy is also a sharp-witted contrarian who'll vigorously defend an unpopular opinion in class or in print.

He stunned even his critics, though, in the Minucci case. And for many African-Americans irked by his devil's-advocate style, Kennedy's decision to testify - for free - was the last straw. Online journal The Black Commentator and the Rev. Al Sharpton, among others, rebuked Kennedy and accused him of giving racists permission to drop the N-bomb with impunity. "I could take the book, and I did," says Ron Walters, a University of Maryland political scientist. But, he adds, for Kennedy to testify in a case "where an African-American clearly had been victimized . . . it was the wrong thing."

Kennedy says his critics don't get it. He wrote the book and chose to testify because the N-word has evolved, and education can blunt its sting. Minucci's team persuaded him that the defendant's liberty was at stake. On the witness stand, "I never said this word could never be an insult," Kennedy says. "The question was, in this particular case, is it always that? Or can it be other things?

"All I'm urging [is], I think this is an important word in American life, and people ought to know about it."

Derrick Bell, a New York University law professor who taught with Kennedy at Harvard in the early 1980s, isn't surprised. "That's just Randy," Bell says. "He loves to argue." He adds that Kennedy probably saw it as a matter of integrity, backing up his book. However, "we differ on the stance that we have on race. I guess I'm from the old school that tries not to comfort white folks."

Still, Kennedy sometimes wonders if his most infamous book - written almost as an afterthought from a collection of lectures and essays - will become an unwanted legacy. "I wouldn't have imagined it, and I tell you the truth, it has been on my mind," he says, chuckling. "I'm not happy with that prospect - I really am not."

So renowned is his depth of knowledge on the issue, though, that Kennedy often gets e-mails from young whites asking if it's OK to use the word with black friends (his advice: Talk it out with them first). This week, he'll be talking about "nigger" at a Berlin seminar on violence and language. Kennedy says his next book, Sellout, explores "the idea of racial betrayal" - African-Americans denying their heritage to get ahead.

Kennedy insists he'll continue to speak his mind, despite the critics. "That was never a problem," he says, recalling Samuel Johnson, who considered writers to be agitators of the public mind. "You're asking for attention, you're putting something out there," Kennedy says. "You're a disturber . . . [and] if you're a disturber, you've got to be ready for anything that comes."

He is. "I've got thick skin," he adds. "Always have."

Joseph Williams is the Globe’s deputy Washington bureau chief. E-mail him at jowilliams@globe.com.