Author Randall Kennedy grapples with a stigma of our racial discourse that is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in black America: "selling out," or racial betrayal. The new book, which comes in the wake of his controversial national best-seller, *Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word*, shows how usage of the word "sellout" bedevils blacks and whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole.
Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, freedom of expression, and the regulation of race relations. Mr. Kennedy was born in Columbia, South Carolina. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States. Awarded the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law, Mr. Kennedy writes for a wide range of scholarly and general interest publications, and sits on the editorial boards of *The Nation*, *Dissent*, and *The American Prospect*. A member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, Mr. Kennedy was awarded an honorary degree by Haverford College and is a former trustee of Princeton University. Image courtesy of Martha Stewart.