Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption Pantheon Books Jan. 2003 isbn: 0375402551 $35.00 Other Books by Randall Kennedy

Randall Kennedy, January 16

Thursday, 6pm
Sackler Museum
485 Broadway, Cambridge
Tickets available free of charge at Harvard Book Store information desk.

Fears of transgressive interracial relationships, informed over the centuries by ugly racial biases and fantasies, still linger in American society today. This brilliant study—ranging from plantation days to the present—explores the historical, sociological, legal, and moral issues that continue to feed and complicate that fear.

In chapters filled with provocative and cleanly stated logic and enhanced by intriguing historical anecdotes, Randall Kennedy tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics and of race in sexual politics, the prominence of legal institutions in defining racial distinction and policing racial boundaries, the imagined and real pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy, and the competing arguments around interracial romance, sex, and family life throughout American history.

In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy offers nothing less than a bracing, much-needed ethic of multiracial living.

Author Biography:

Randall Kennedy is the author of Nigger and Race, Crime, and the Law. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton, and his law degree from Yale. A Rhodes Scholar, he served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is a professor at Harvard Law School, and lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.