In Say It Loud! (Pantheon, Sept.), Harvard law professor Kennedy weighs in on America’s roiling racial debates.

Should we defund the police?

The idea that we can get rid of police and prisons is deeply mistaken. The administration of criminal justice in the U.S. is scandalous. Police are not restrained as they should be, and our society is hyper-punitive. Serious reforms are needed. But when I talk to people who say they’re in favor of defunding the police and I press them, they usually say, “Well, what we really mean is that we want to allocate resources to unarmed forces to deal with people who have mental problems.” Fine, that’s sensible, but that’s not what springs to mind when you say “defund” or “abolish” the police. Now, there are 10% who say, “No, I really mean it.” The society they want is not the sort of society that I want.

You write about an open letter by some Princeton faculty proposing a faculty committee to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication [among] faculty.” What are your concerns about that?

That proposal would threaten academic freedom and intellectual inquiry. After that provision was publicized and criticized, I thought there would be a lot of people saying, “Hey, I didn’t really pay attention to that provision—I don’t want any part of that.” But that didn’t happen, and in fact certain professors doubled down and tried to justify the provision. I found that very disturbing.

You write about saying the N-word in class, and say it’s okay for white professors to do that, too.

I’m against anybody deploying racist speech to demean, intimidate, or terrorize people, which is certainly how the word has been used. But how can one understand the racist use of the term without reading texts where it appears? I teach courses on race and the law, and we read speeches, articles, and court opinions containing the word, and I read it out loud when it’s pedagogically sound to do so. Any teacher should be able to do that regardless of race. We shouldn’t start parsing out knowledge and say that this is the turf of Black professors and over there is the turf of white professors. I don’t want ethnic boundaries fencing people out while privileging others.

You discuss the tension in Black thought between racial optimists who believe that racial integration can succeed and racial pessimists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, or separatists like Elijah Muhammad, who doubt that integration can deliver true racial equality. Where do you stand?

I’m an old-fashioned, 1965-type integrationist, and there was a time when I was a very confident optimist. But the last few years, with the ascension of Donald Trump and the continued support for Trumpism, have challenged that. If I have to choose I’m still in the optimistic camp, but my confidence has been shaken.