LANI
GUINIER BRINGS HER UNIQUE VISION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
TO BARNARD LECTURE
By
Matthew Schuerman
NEW
YORK, N.Y., Nov. 14, 2001 - Lani Guinier brought
her unique vision of social justice to an overflow
crowd of almost 300 in the Held Lecture Hall
on Tuesday, exhorting her listeners to change
the rules of the power game instead of simply
replacing the people in charge.
The
Harvard law professor, delivering this year's
Gildersleeve Lecture, said too often social
reformers fail to take aim at true injustice:
a winner-take-all society where too few people
have any power at all.
"When
we become the winners, somehow we believe we
will exercise zero-sum power differently," Guinier
said. "It is that claim I want to challenge,
because climbing up the hierarchy -- what a
colleague calls climbing backwards up the cheese
grater -- you become a nubbin of who you once
were."
Students, faculty and other members of the college
community filled the seats and lined the walls
of the Julius S. Held Lecture Hall, vying to
hear the outspoken civil rights theorist who
first gained prominence when, in 1993, President
Clinton nominated her as assistant attorney
general only to withdraw her name before it
came up for a vote. Five years later she became
the first tenured minority woman faculty member
at Harvard Law School.
At
times irreverent and humorous, Guinier expressed
concern for the way civil rights have been restricted
since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and also
poked fun at leaders of African-American organizations
who rely more on rhyme than on leadership.
Rearranging
power structures.
But for the most part, her lecture Tuesday was
full of stories about people rearranging power
structures: a city councilor in Brazil proposed
bills formulated in theater workshops with different
constituencies; law students played a form of
bingo based on which of their classmates talked
the most during lectures; a unit of all-woman
police officers brought crime down in a New
York City housing project.
The
female officers, Guinier noted, could not intimidate
the residents of the housing project with their
height or strength the way that male officers
could. But the women changed the rules of the
game, winning the respect of potential trouble
makers in other ways.
"Their
power lay in reaching out and identifying with
these young men and mentoring them," Guinier
said. "Women are willing to dissipate conflict,
not dominate the situation."
Guinier
also drew upon her forthcoming book, The
Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power,
Transforming Democracy, co-authored with
Gerald Torres and due to be published by Harvard
University Press in February. The title refers
to the way that minorities and women have been
used to signal when something has gone awry
in society, much the way the canaries that accompanied
coal miners underground would die first, indicating
that oxygen was running low.
Canary
with a gas mask.
"Our solution is to outfit the canary with a
pint-sized gas mask so it can withstand the
toxic atmosphere," she said.
But
instead, Guinier suggested that broader solutions
can benefit all sectors of society. In another
of her anecdotes, a calculus professor named
Uri Treisman at first introduced his African-American
students to techniques, such as lunchtime study
groups, that made his Chinese-American students
so successful. That, in essence, is handing
a gas mask to the canary. Treisman ultimately
changed the atmosphere when he refashioned his
whole course to include the type of group problem-solving
that would benefit all students.
In
a surprise before the lecture, Kenneth McMillan,
a telephone technician who went to Andrew Jackson
High School with Guinier in Queens, showed up
with a 1967 yearbook from their graduating year.
Guinier
went on to attend Radcliffe College, then Yale
Law School, where her classmates included Bill
Clinton. The two were close enough that he attended
her wedding.
But
in 1993, after the Wall Street Journal
called Guinier the Quota Queen, Clinton rescinded
his nomination, citing articles she had written
for legal journals. In fact, her ideas were
not all that radical: she was advocating a system
of proportional representation--where all citizens
in a state vote for, say, eight or 10 representatives
instead of just one from a gerrymandered district--that
is in place for local races in several counties
and cities across the country.
The
post 9/11 environment.
A different sort of civil rights were on the
mind of audience members Tuesday, who in questions
following the lecture, brought up the plight
of Arab Americans and others who have been detained
without charges since the Sept. 11. Diane Aboushi,
a Barnard alumna from the class of 2000, asked
if the detainees might not form the basis of
the next civil rights movement.
"I'm
skeptical of that," Guinier answered, "because
of the way in which dissent generally is being
silenced and the difficulty of having a conversation
when nothing critical is being said."
Guinier continued, "But I challenge each of
us to find that opportunity to reaffirm power
to achieve justice that benefits more than just
ourselves."
Another audience member, Saba Bireda, a legal
assistant living in New York, asked for Guinier's
opinion of women's roles in African-American
organizations.
"Too
much of the current civil rights leadership
is oriented towards a single individual who
stands before a podium speaking in rhyme," Guinier
replied. "I'm not convinced that's what's needed
to lead a social justice movement. There are
women leaders, but I fear those women are running
their organizations the same way their predecessors
did."
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