In the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Professor Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School sits down for an exclusive interview with Steve Murphy, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard Medical School and Tom Mesereau,  and grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another stigma of our racial discourse: "selling out," or racial betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. Kennedy begins his exploration of selling out with a cogent, historical definition of the "black" community, accounting precisely for who is considered black and who is not. He looks at the ways in which prominent members of that community--Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama, among others--have been stigmatized as sellouts. He outlines the history of the suspicion of racial betrayal among blacks, and he shows how current fears of selling out are expressed in thought and practice. He also offers insight and advice from successful African-Americans to the next generation of black leaders about these issues.

Professor Kennedy is a tenured scholar and author 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.

Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint is Director of the Media Center of the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston. He is also a Professor of Psychiatry and Faculty Associate Dean for Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School.

He is co-author, with James P. Comer, M.D., of Raising Black Children, 1992; and co-author, with Amy Alexander, of Lay My Burden Down, 2000.

He has written dozens of articles for lay and professional publications. In 1997, he received a New England Emmy award for Outstanding Children's Special as co-executive producer of Willoughby's Wonders. Dr. Poussaint is an expert on race relations in America, the dynamics of prejudice, and issues of diversity as our society becomes increasingly multicultural. He believes that extreme (violent) racists suffer from a delusional mental illness. He lectures widely on college campuses and also serves as a consultant to government agencies and private corporations.

In addition, he is active in consulting to the media on a wide range of social issues. He is concerned with media images and issues regarding the needs of children and the changing family; he has been active in the national TV rating and V-chip discussions. He is a strong proponent of non-violent parenting and parenting education.

Born in East Harlem, he attended Columbia and received his M.D. from Cornell University in 1960. He completed his postgraduate training at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he served as Chief Resident in Psychiatry in 1964-65. At UCLA, he pursued research in psychopharmacology.

In 1967, after leaving Mississippi, Dr. Poussaint joined the Tufts Medical School faculty as director of a psychiatry program in a low-income housing development. In 1969, he joined Harvard. From 1975-1978 he was Director of Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School. He was a script consultant to NBC's The Cosby Show and continues to consult to the media as an advocate of more responsible programming.

He is a life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and a fellow of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. He has received numerous awards and is the recipient of many honorary degrees.