Word: lany
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After the thrashing she took on editorial pages last year as a multicultural extremist and a "quota queen," it seems that Lani Guinier '71 is coming back with a vengeance. In addition to her long-held tenured professorship at Penn law school, she's been hot on the lecture circuit, she's published her first book and her ideas are now given serious consideration as potential solutions to current voting rights problems. "Call it Lani Guinier's Revenge," says The New York Times. What's more, she's been invited to speak at Harvard as this year's Class...
...first impression of Guinier completely wrong? Guinier and her supporters certainly say so. Quotes were taken out of context, her ideas were hacked into soundbites, and everything was made twenty times worse by the media frenzy. Well, this only begs the real question, what should we make of Lani Guinier...
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...
...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...