Word: guinier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Here there are really two Lani Guiniers, old and new. The new one is progressive and confident; the old one, grim and overbearingly cynical on matter of race. It was the former, darker version of Lani Guinier that got her into trouble last year when President Clinton nominated her to the administration's civil rights enforcement post. This was the image that got her labeled "quota queen" and that expressed itself in glum, vampiress-like caricatures in magazines and editorial pages...
...review articles, Guinier wrote that racism is so deeply entrenched in our society that, barring state intervention, "[r]acism excludes minorities from ever becoming part of the governing coalition." She characterized whites as a "hostile, permanent majority." Most notorious was her theory of "authentic black representation," where she argued that for black constituencies, blacks make more "authentic" representatives than whites. "Black representatives are authentic because they are descriptively similar to their constituents," she wrote. "In other words, they are politically, psychologically, and culturally black...
...surprising that this version of Lani Guinier drew attacks from every direction. Even many liberals were worried, thinking that Guinier didn't believe in the integrationist the vision of Martin Luther King. The editors of The New Republic argued for with-drawing her nomination, warning that Guinier "stands against everything that Clinton once promised in terms of a new, integrationist approach to civil rights." On this view, Lani Guinier was merely the flipside of the cynical racial politics of the Reagan era: but instead of distrusting blacks, she promoted the distrust of whites. Guinier, like many Republicans, believed...
...Guinier is playing up a new image. And it's working. People are starting to see her as progressive, upbeat, and mainstream. Instead of conveying distrust, Guinier now calls up the optimistic belief that America can get past the "poison of racism" with the right reforms. This Lani Guinier ends her new book with a plea for racial healing, public dialogue, positive-sum solutions, moving the country forward, and further progress "towards Martin Luther King's vision of a society in which we are judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin...
...Guinier has now made it clear that the believes that race is neither biology nor destiny. In a 1993 article re-printed in her new book, The Tyranny of the Majority, Guinier says that "racial groups are not monolithic, nor are they necessarily cohesive." Guinier wants to let individuals determine their own identities, loyalties, and interests. She says that "groups should be represented, but in way that permit automatic, self-defined apportionment based on shifting political or cultural affiliation and interests." This clearly sets her apart from radical Afrocentric loonies like Leonard Jeffries...