Lani Guinier
The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy

co-hosted by Harvard Law School journal Civil Rights, Civil Liberties
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Like the canaries that alerted miners to a poisonous atmosphere, issues of race point to underlying problems in society that ultimately affect everyone, not just minorities. Addressing these issues is essential. Ignoring racial differences--race blindness--has failed. Focusing on individual achievement has diverted us from tackling pervasive inequalities. Now, in a powerful and challenging book, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres propose a radical new way to confront race in the twenty-first century. Terming their concept "political race," Guinier and Torres call for the building of grass-roots, cross-racial coalitions to remake those structures of power by fostering public participation in politics and reforming the process of democracy.

"'To my friends, I look like a black boy. To white people I don't know, I look like a wanna-be punk. To the cops I look like a criminal,' explains Lani Guinier's 14-year-old biracial son. Mixing myriad personal examples with hard data and analysis of biased news reports, Guinier and Torres cogently and forcefully argue that 'color-blind' solutions are not 'attaining racial justice and ensuring a healthy democratic process.'...Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Torres, professor at the University of Texas Law School, also grapple intelligently and with passionate wit with such explosive topics as racial profiling and the elusiveness of racial identification and identity (i.e., 'white Hispanics'), making this one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years." -- Publishers Weekly