Guinier's New Look

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 day speaker.

Was our 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?

Judging from her recent writings and speeches, I think that Guinier is a provocative yet sensible reformer who is basically on the right track. Her ideas hold out some startlingly refreshing implications, some of which are actually bad news for the multicultural radicals that she was first identified with.

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.

There are two main features to cumulative voting, neither very radical. First, cumulative voting gives each voter the same number of multiple votes instead of allowing only one vote per office. Second, cumulative voting takes place in voting districts that are much larger and heterogeneous than existing ones. This way, voters can either concentrate their votes on one candidate or spread their votes out among several. In contrast to the small-district, winner-take all system, cumulative voting helps minority interests by allowing a greater number of minority group members--spread out over a larger geographic area--to concentrate their votes on one candidate.

So if 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 of abuse she went through. But Guinier was worried about race. And it was Guinier's fixation on race that worried everyone else.

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.

In her old law 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."

It's not 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 "in the racial analysis of an irreducible, racial `us' and `them' in American society."

Now 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.

The new Guinier puts her reforms in the service of progressive ideals rather than using them as cynical shield against white oppression. Recently she's been saying that her proposed system of cumulatitive voting "promotes a concept of racial group identity that is interest-based rather than biological." Guinier's proposed reforms aim to allow voters flexibility to "self-select their identities" and to vote with other voters who share the same interests, whether they are of the same race or not. Voters should be able to from "self-identified, voluntary constituencies that choose to combine because of like minds, not like bodies." Guinier advertises that cumulative voting will even encourage cross-racial coalitions and lessen racial polarization in politics. Under her reformed system," [n]o one is locked into a minority identity," she writes. "Nor is anyone necessarily isolated by the identity they choose."

If anyone should be wary of Guinier, it's the multicultural activists who want to institutionalize their group identities. Whether they want to set up ethnic studies departments or ensure themselves a permanent affirmative-action check-off box of graduate school application, ethnic activists who demand such special treatment from institutions should take heed of Guinier's warnings about entrenching racial divisions and categorizations. Measures like racial gerrymandering, Guinier warns, "may be rigidly essentialist, presumptuously isolating, or politically divisive." Race-based affirmative action and separate ethnic studies departments (Asian American, Latino, etc.) share the same essentialist, presumptuous and divisive potential.

It seems, however, that some conservatives at Harvard still have the on image of Guinier. Last week, when Guinier was announced Class Day speaker, campus conservatives derided her "radical" and "extreme" views and even referred to her as a "moron." Conservatives should listen when Guinier speaks in June. They might find themselves agreeing.