Word: guinier
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...acceptance of the South African presidency (and F.W. de Klerk's concession of the same position) provide a sharp contrast with the hopeless inadequacy of minority political representation in the United States. It is this second argument which is pointed out powerfully by the recent publication of Lani Guinier '71's collection of articles,The Tyranny of the Majority...
...effect, the same point which was made rather less precisely and logically by the furor over Guinier's nomination to the position of assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division in the Clinton Administration early in 1993. The characterization of her work as "profoundly anti-democratic" and of Guinier herself as a "Quota Queen" by the press, which led eventually to the President's withdrawl of her nomination, can itself be read as a signal of a "national discomfort with the brute facts of racial injustice." At least, this is the interpretation placed on last year...
...presentation of Guinier's own arguments directly after the quoted views of her critics drives home Stephen Carter's point that "many of the reporters who covered the Guinier story did not bother to read the scholarship about which they were writing...". In proof of this, an entire essay is devoted to the case against quotas, or what the author terms "tokenism." Here she argues persuasively that focusing on the number of Black representatives elected replaces political with electoral outcomes as the major cause for concern. For example, "one Black elected official proportionately represented on a small city council operating...
This, among other points, leads Guinier to propose the solution of "cumulative voting." Under this system, a single representative would on longer be tied directly to a particular geographical area. Instead, an expanded constituency would elect a number of representatives, each member of the electorate possessing the same number of votes as there were spaces to fill. such a change would, in Guinier's opinion, allow minority groups to block their votes together in order to elect a genuinely 'representative' candidate. It would also force incumbents into a more direct accountability to their constituents as, since re-election now depends...
This proposal is where Guinier is genuinely controversial, as it could be, (and was) forcefully argued, that cumulative voting the assumption of a "a preexisting general, common, uniform perspective or cultural understanding," which we do not have, and have never had. But even had Guinier been permitted to take up the position to which she was appointed, the power actually to affect such systemic change would never have been hers. The power she would have had, however, would have been to awaken the public to the idea that dominatesThe Tyranny of the Majority."Voting is not just about winning elections...