Still having her say: more than a decade after becoming a household name, harvard law professor Lani Guinier holds true to her beliefs, principles

Black Issues in Higher Education, March 25, 2004 by Ronald Roach

LANI GUINIER

TITLE: Bennett Boskey Professor of Law. Harvard University Law School. Cambridge, Mass.

EDUCATION: B.A., Radcliffe College, J.D., Yale University Law School

BIRTHPLACE: New York City, N.Y.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Professional responsibility, public interest law, race and gender, criminal process, voting rights.

That Lani Guinier is one of the most publicly visible and outspoken scholars in the American academy should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed her career or read her books. The first and only African American woman to hold a tenured faculty position at the Harvard University law school, Guinier has put her visibility to use by speaking out on issues of race, gender and democratic decision-making and by urging honest public discussion on these issues.

In July 1998, Guinier joined the Harvard law school faculty. At Harvard, she teaches courses on professional responsibility for public lawyers, law and the political process, and critical perspectives on race, gender, class and social change. Interestingly, her Jamaican-born father, Ewart Guinier, had been the first chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard in 1969. The elder Guinier, who was a labor organizer and lawyer, had attended Harvard as an undergraduate in the early 1930s, but left disenchanted after experiencing considerable racial discrimination.

Prior to her Harvard law school appointment. Guinier had been a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania law school in Philadelphia, Pa. A civil rights attorney during the late 1970s and 1980s, Guinier had worked in the civil rights division in the U.S. Justice Department during he Carter administration and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she headed the voting rights program.

In 1993, Guinier came to national prominence when President Bill Clinton nominated her to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Alter conservatives crusaded against the nomination over her views on proportional democratic representation and voter participation, the nomination was withdrawn without Guinier having he benefit of a hearing to defend her ideas.

Guinier is the author of The Tyramy of the Majority; Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision Social Justice, and the co-author of The Miner's Canary: Rethinking Race and Power and Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law Schools and Institutional Change. In recent years, she mad collaborators have launched Web sites, RaceTalks.org and Minerscanary.org, to promote public discussions on race and gender equity.

Black Issues spoke to Guinier at her law school office this past January.

BI: As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board, how would you characterize the progress we've made in the march toward racial equality?

LG: As a Black person, I certainly would prefer to be born now than before 1950, which is when l was born. And yet in some ways I feel we've made progress; things are better. You don't hear the same overt bigotry being proclaimed without apology.

But in other ways I wouldn't want to trade the experiences that I've had over the past 50 years for a chance to be part of the new generation that's trying to continue to remake America. Because in some ways the challenges that we faced in the 1950s and 1960s were more clear. And there was a sense of community and a sense of collective commitment and consciousness that was affirming. Where as now, I think students feel very torn between the call to improve themselves individually and the tension that they have looking at the rest of the Black community and seeing that so many of their relatives or their friends, their peers, are being left further and further behind. There's a sense of confusion and paralysis.

BI: Are you optimistic that we will see continued progress for racial justice?

LG: Of course, I'm always optimistic, I think I read somewhere that when you consider that chattel slavery for centuries had been accepted, and now in the year 2004 it's considered universally condemned, that shows that in the space of 150 years our understanding of justice has expanded. So maybe that's an example.

On the other hand, the fight against slavery was clear. And the fight against institutional racism, or the way in which racism is used to justify poverty in this society the relationship between race and class, or race, class and geography is deeply embedded in our constitutional structure, in the foundations of our political and economic system, and yet it is not as visible. And so it makes the challenges more complicated.

BI: Looking back on 1993 when the Clinton Administration failed to support your nomination as the civil rights chief for the U.S. Justice Department, do you think the pubtic discourse on civil rights changed for the better? Why or why not?

LG: I think it's changed for the better, I think in 1993 people were really intimidated by the right-wing assault and by the co-optation of the rhetoric by the conservative groups that were mounting a challenge using the rhetoric of color-blindness. Where as by now, I think people understand the mood and are better prepared to respond.