Experiences of minorities warn of social ills, Guinier says

Experiences of minorities warn of social ills, Guinier says
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BY DANA BENSON
Special to the Rice News

Harvard law professor
Lani Guinier argued to a Rice audience that the experience
of the disadvantaged in America is the same experience of
the miner’s canary. Just as canaries alerted miners
to poisonous conditions in the atmosphere, the experience
of minorities points to underlying societal problems.

She delivered
her talk, “The Miner’s Canary,” at the Jan.
22 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture, an annual event of the
President’s Lecture Series.

“The experience
of those who have been excluded, the experience of women,
the experience of the disabled, the experience of gays and
lesbians, the experience of people of color and particularly
the experience of African-Americans and Latinos is the experience
of the canary,” she said.

Our tendency,
Guinier explained, is to attribute the canary’s distress
in the mine to a problem within itself. “We locate
those problems in the canary, and then we say, ‘Maybe
we could fix the canary, outfit it with a little pint-sized
gas mask or respirator.’ But I think Dr. King would
have wanted us not just to fix the canary, but to heed the
lessons of the canary, understand that the experience the
canary was having was a signal, a lens that we need to look
through to understand what was happening to all of us.”

Guinier and her
colleague, University of Texas law professor Gerald Torres,
drew on the methodology of King in establishing their metaphor.
Together, Guinier and Torres penned “The Miner’s
Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy.”

Many people who
have heard King’s speeches, particularly his “I
Have a Dream” speech, believe that the civil rights
leader was an advocate for colorblindness, Guinier said.
But that is a misunderstanding of his vision and his methodology,
she said.

“A colorblind
vision makes sense if what you’re trying to do is eradicate
racism and you believe that racism is exclusively about
the way in which individuals view each other, if you believe
that racism is about bad people harboring bad thoughts,
if you believe that racism is about considering some group
of people, based solely on the color of their skin, to be
inferior.

“But I think
that Dr. King’s methodology was much more vibrant than
simply a method that was trying to protect those who had
been victimized by prejudice.”

She noted a 1959
speech by King in which he discussed the difference between
being a victim and being someone who views things from the
margin of society and as a result of that different perspective
begins to not only reclaim his own rights, but to develop
a new understanding of the center.

“Dr. King
said, ‘The negro, in his struggle to secure his own
rights, is destined to enlarge democracy for all people
in both a political and social sense.’ He went on to
say that the civil rights movement was a struggle of perpetual
engagement to make America live up to its stated ideals,
and he concluded that ‘by freeing themselves, blacks
will be freeing whites too,’” Guinier said.

She emphasized
that the disadvantaged and underrepresented can move from
the margin to the center, and in the process they can lead
the rest of society into reclaiming the center in a new
and transformed way. She cited two examples of how this
can be done, both involving higher education.

Her first example
was that of University of California–Berkeley calculus
professor Morrie Tribesman, who noticed that his African-American
students were not performing as well as Chinese-American
students.

He eventually
learned that the Chinese-American students studied calculus
as a group and talked about the subject often, a method
that was crucial to the mastery of calculus. Tribesman taught
his African-American students to do the same thing, and
their performance in class improved.

“You might
say he fixed the canary — except that at that moment,
he had an epiphany. He realized the problem that had come
to light through the experience of the African-American
students was ultimately not a problem with those students.
It was a problem in the way he was teaching to all of the
students. He was using the ‘chalk and talk’ method,
but then he introduced group-based learning into his calculus
class to benefit all of his students.”

What Tribesman
ended up doing, she said, was taking from the margin to
infuse and reinvigorate the center. “Perhaps the way
in which we have always done things, while familiar, is
not necessarily the only way or the most effective way,”
she said.

Her second example
involved the Texas 10 Percent Plan, in which the top 10
percent of the graduating class at all Texas public high
schools are granted admission to state universities.

The plan was
proposed after a group of educators and lawmakers became
concerned about a lack of minorities at The University of
Texas, which had no affirmative-action plan.

They studied
evidence that showed that minorities score lower on standardized
tests like the LSAT and SAT, but they also found that there
was no correlation between test scores and first-year college
performance.

They did find
a correlation, Guinier noted, between the wealth of a student’s
family and test scores: the wealthier the family, the higher
the scores. In fact, they discovered that 75 percent of
the freshman class at The University of Texas was coming
from only 10 percent of Texas high schools — wealthier
suburban schools with few minorities.

So, Guinier explained,
the lawmakers proposed the Texas 10 Percent Plan, and the
legislation passed by only one vote — the vote of a
white Republican who represented a West Texas poor working-class
white constituency that had not been going on to the state
universities.

Like minority
students, they also were not performing well on the SAT.

“That Republican
representative was persuaded by the canary that the problems
that they were diagnosing was not just affecting people
of color, but also affecting his constituents,” she
said.

“It’s
important to understand that those who are interested in
issues of diversity, those who are watching the canary,
come up with innovative ways of rethinking conventional
thinking that can benefit not only the canary, but the miners
as well.”