The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy - Hardcover

Guinier, Lani

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674004698 ISBN 13: 9780674004696

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Like the canaries that alerted miners to a poisonous atmosphere, issues of race point to underlying problems in society that ultimately affect everyone, not just minorities. Addressing these issues is essential. Ignoring racial differences - race blindness - has failed. Focusing on individual achievement has diverted us from tackling pervasive inequalities. In this work, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres propose a way to confront race in the 21st century. Given the complex relationship between race and power in America, engaging race means engaging standard winner-take-all hierarchies of power as well. Terming their concept "political race," Guinier and Torres call for the building of grass-roots, cross-racial coalitions to remake those structures of power by fostering public participation in politics and reforming the process of democracy. Their stories of political race in action include the coalition of Hispanic and black leaders who devised the Texas Ten Percent Plan to establish equitable state college admissions criteria, and the struggle of black workers in North Carolina for fair working conditions that drew on the strength and won the support of the entire local community. The aim of political race is not merely to remedy racial injustices, but to create truly participatory democracy, where people of all races feel empowered to effect changes that will improve conditions for everyone. In this book, Guinier and Torres envision a social justice movement that could transform the nature of democracy in America.

About this title

Review:

Legal scholars Guinier and Torres invite the public to consider, among other indicators, the plight of young black men, long the primary targets of racial profiling on the part of law-enforcement agencies...Those who insist that American courts dispense justice equally get a stern lesson with statistics the authors cite to the contrary, while civil-rights activists will find much to motivate them in the authors' prescriptions, which include grassroots political organizing, consensus building, "enlisting race to resist hierarchy," and other measures. A useful, provocative, wounded critique of the status quo. Mixing myriad personal examples with hard data and analysis of biased news reports, Guinier and Torres cogently and forcefully argue that "color-blinded" solutions are not "attaining racial justice and ensuring a healthy democratic process.,."[The authors] grapple intelligently and with passionate wit with such explosive topics as racial profiling and the elusiveness of racial identification and identity...making this one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres consider how blacks' own perceptions of their plight might lead to a new political movement. In "The Miner's Canary", Guinier and Torres argue that rather than internalize their social dysfunction as being their "own fault," many blacks have developed a critical perspective on "the system." Refusing to accept the mythology of the American Dream--"that those who succeed or fail invariably do so according to their individual merit"--blacks "appreciate the necessity and efficacy of collective political struggle."..Guinier and Torres announce a bold agenda: "to use the experiences of people of color as the basis for fundamental social change that will benefit not only blacks and Hispanics but other disadvantaged social groups."--James Forman Jr."Washington Post" (02/03/2002) Deep in the mines, a distressed canary is a warning that there's poison in the air. Professor Lani Guinier...and Gerald Torres...contend that in America, race is like a miner's canary: Injustices experienced by people of color warn of systemic toxins that threaten everyone...In a passionate call for social change and progressive action, Guinier and Torres convincingly argue that a colorblind approach to deeply entrenched problems does not work; it only inhibits democratic engagement and reinforces existing power structures. Citing the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.'s message that freeing black people from injustice will free America itself, Torres and Guinier urge progressives to use racial awareness as an entryway to political activism.--Rob Mitchell"Boston Herald" (02/05/2002) How can a book that advocates for something as ethereal-sounding as the "magical realism of political race" amount to a powerfully reasoned and concretely grounded call for the proliferation of multiracial coalitions in challenges to inequality and exclusion in American society? Law professors Guinier and Torres have managed to do so in their gracefully written book, which is both an analysis of the distinctive contours of the post-Civil Rights Era's racial fault lines and a manifesto for a politics that is decidedly color conscious. Indeed, the purpose of the book is to challenge not simply the calls for colorblindedness on the part of conservatives, but more significantly, similar calls on the part of political leftists.--P. Kivisto"Choice" (10/01/2002)

About the Author:

Lani Guinier is Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Gerald Torres is H.O. Head Centennial Professor in Real Property Law, University of Texas Law School.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0674004698
• ISBN 13: 9780674004696
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400