Word: guinier
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...Guinier's ideas for reform are cogent and persuasive. The centerpiece of her thought is cumulative voting, which is a system of proportional representation. There is a strong case for this alternative over our familiar winner-take-all system. As independent empirical studies have shown, proportional representation tends to produce more representative legislative bodies, minimize wasted votes, bring an end to gerrymandering, discourage negative campaigning, encourage issue-oriented campaigns and produce higher voter turnout rates. And this system is already common in Europe...
...this is what Guinier wants implemented, why all the fuss? Because Guinier has chosen to apply her ideas to the sensitive problem of race. Guinier promotes cumulative voting as an alternative to racial gerrymandering in areas where racial-bloc voting (usually by whites) produces majority tyranny (usually over blacks). If Guinier had argued for cumulative voting as a better voting system as a way of improving the political representation of women, or even as a way of giving oppressed members of the gun-enthusiast and smoking minorities a greater political voice, Guinier would probably have been spared the degree...
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...