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LANI GUINIER’S IDEAS ARE GOOD FOR MULTIRACIAL DEMOCRACY
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- GUINIER’S IDEAS WON’T HELP SOLVE RACISM OR PROMOTE DEMOCRACY
LANI GUINIER’S IDEAS ARE GOOD FOR MULTIRACIAL DEMOCRACY1. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AIDS DEMOCRACY, AND SHOULD INCLUDE POOR WHITES Lani Guinier, Professor, Harvard Law School, address delivered before the National Urban League’s State of America 2000 Conference, June 14, 2000, p. np, http://www.minerscanary.org/mainart/confirmative_action.shtml, accessed May 1, 2002. If we are to move beyond the present polarization in a manner consistent with the commitments to fairness and equality that both positions endorse, we must more carefully explore how to measure and what to call merit, and what constitutes fairness for all, in a multiracial democracy. A first step is to view “merit” as a functional rather than generic concept, while keeping firmly in mind the democratic purposes of higher education and the specific mission of most institutions of higher education. In other words, we should seek to reconfirm the democratic role of higher education in a multiracial society by re-connecting admissions processes to the public mission of both public and private schools. In doing so, we confirm the benefits of affirmative action—but not simply to people of color—by re-casting merit as a practical term that is intimately connected with each institution’s specific mission. That focus, in turn, allows us to reconsider the relationship between individual merit and operational fairness, between claims of individual desert based on past opportunities and individual contributions based on future societal needs. I tentatively call this a process of confirmative action, because it takes lessons from both the testocracy as well as affirmative action to confirm a set of experimental and pragmatic actions that begin to link (ad)mission practices for all students to the broad mission and public character of higher education in a multiracial democracy. 2. “CONFIRMATIVE ACTION” IS A COMMITMENT TO DEMOCRACY Lani Guinier, Professor, Harvard Law School, address delivered before the National Urban League’s State of America 2000 Conference, June 14, 2000, p. np, http://www.minerscanary.org/mainart/confirmative_action.shtml, accessed May 1, 2002. Our commitment to democratic values benefits from studies like the one at the University of Michigan, which showcase the experience of people of color and many women, who carry a commitment to contributing back to those who are less fortunate. In this fuller accounting of the democratic values of publicly supported institutions, each of us is then obligated not only to succeed as individuals, but to “lift as we climb.” Merit becomes a forward-looking function of what a democratic society needs and values rather than a fixed, quantifiable and backwards-looking entity that, like one’s family tree or family assets, can be chronicled with the proper instruments. Merit, in other words, becomes future-oriented and dynamic. Dynamic merit involves a commitment to distribution of opportunity not only at birth but also through one’s life. It is contextual and resistant to standardized measurement. It is changing and manifests itself differently depending on how you look at it. It requires modesty in our beliefs about what we can measure in human beings, even as it demands clarifying and explicitly stating our institutional objectives.
Many commentators painted Guinier as a racial polarizer who implies that "only blacks can represent blacks," as George Will put it (Newsweek, 6/14/93). And she was repeatedly charged with believing that only "authentic" blacks counted. But in a Michigan Law Review article (3/91), Guinier stated that "authentic representatives need not be black as long as the source of the authority, legitimacy and power base is the black community." But more important, she was not endorsing the concept of authentic representation; she was critiquing it, describing it as a "limited empowerment tool." GUINIER’S IDEAS WON’T HELP SOLVE RACISM OR PROMOTE DEMOCRACY1. GUINIER IGNORES THAT RACISM IS TOO DEEPLY ROOTED FOR HER PROPOSALS Mark Tushnet, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center, BOSTON REVIEW June/September 1994, http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR19.3/tushnet.html, accessed May 1, 2002. What is most striking about Guinier's work, given these tensions, is how optimistic and fundamentally conservative she is. For her, people -- perhaps most particularly whites -- have mistakenly seen politics as a zero-sum game, in which what one group wins necessarily comes at the expense of another group. Instead, she proposes, we ought to believe -- apparently in the face of the failures of public policy -- that society is not so racially polarized; public policy could generate gains for everyone. All we need to do, according to Guinier's optimistic vision, is develop procedures which will allow all of us to work together to find the policies which will do that. The substantive failures of policy can be eliminated by following the indirect strategy of using the right procedures. Which invites the pessimist to reply that the failures of policy show that the principle of reciprocity really doesn't work on matters of importance to African Americans, and that those failures must result from a more deeply-rooted racism than Guinier is willing to acknowledge. 2. GUINIER’S IDEAS WERE TRIED AND FAILED 30 YEARS AGO Ward Connerly, Chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, BOSTON REVIEW, December 200/January 2001, http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR25.6/connerly.html, accessed May 1, 2002. Thus, it was surprising, and refreshing, to see Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier propose "shift[ing] the terrain of the debate." Sturm and Guinier implicitly concede that preference proponents cannot carry the day while traditional measures of merit prevail. Thus, they mount a frontal assault on the "prevailing selection procedures" of American society: academic standards measured by paper-and-pencil tests. Unfortunately, their argument is not at all new. Nor do we lack for evidence about how their proposal would work. In 1970, City College of New York embarked on precisely the same social experiment advocated by Sturm and Guinier today: open admissions. While the City College administration shared their concerns about racial equality and merit, the history of City College’s experiment highlights the inherent problems in sacrificing merit on the altar of race.
Ward Connerly, Chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, BOSTON REVIEW, December 200/January 2001, http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR25.6/connerly.html, accessed May 1, 2002. City College’s experiment has failed. Its efforts to create a student body with the right mix of skin colors have polarized it into two schools. Students admitted based on their prior academic performance continue to succeed. City College’s School of Engineering remains one of the best schools in the country, attracting top-flight students from around the world. The English Department is also enjoying a renaissance. Both departments’ alumni often proceed to top graduate programs in the country.
Unfortunately, Sturm and Guinier ignore this fundamental reality. Their prescription of emphasizing race anew merely resurrects the worst of our history. For its entire history, American governments at all levels have sorted us into categories based on our skin color: slave, Indian, free black, octoroon, Caucasian, Hispanic, etc. It is a long and sordid history, one for which we should all be ashamed. The next step in fulfilling America’s promise is to create a colorblind state. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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