Abstract

This review of Randall Kennedy's book--Race, Crime, and the Law--argues that Kennedy provides useful evidence to indict the prevalence of racism at the turn of the 21st Century but that Kennedy's definition of racism, which relies on explicit discriminatory intent, is too narrow to account for the value of statistical approaches that he presents. A logic of disparate impact is necessary to diagnose and remedy the systematic oppressions of racism. The reviewer also considers a structural relationship between liberal and radical thought such that liberal approaches to power may be seen as practical validations of the genuine threat that radicals assert in theory.