Copyright 2002 by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Third printing, 2003
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guinier, Lani.
The miners canary : enlisting race, resisting power, transforming democracy / Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-00469-8 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-01084-1 (pbk.)
1. United StatesRace relationsPolitical aspects. 2. Political participationUnited States. 3. MinoritiesUnited StatesPolitical activity. 4. Coalition (Social sciences) I. Torres, Gerald. II. Title.
E184.A1 G94 2001
323.173dc21 2001039629
In 1953 Felix Cohen wrote: Like the miners canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere, and our treatment of the Indian... marks the rise and fall in our democratic faith.
In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said to his staff: Were going to take this movement and... reach out to the poor people in all directions in this country... into the Southwest after the Indians, into the West after the Chicanos, into Appalachia after the poor whites, and into the ghettos after Negroes and Puerto Ricans. And we are going to bring them together and enlarge this campaign into something bigger than just a civil rights movement for Negroes.
Inspired by the work and the words of Dr. King just before he was killed, and building on the insight of Felix Cohens powerful metaphor, we hope to show that Cohens canary is not alone. All canaries bear watching. Our democratic future depends on it.
On the computer screen, the letters were pulsing. I wrote: At a talk in Chicago one wintry afternoon a middle-aged, very attractive black woman from Texas asked to take a picture with me. She proudly, almost defiantly, turned to the woman waiting in line behind her and announced, Im going to hang this picture in my office. Aint nobody gonna mess with me then! I sat back and lifted my hands from the keyboard, lost in thought, when my eight-year-old son, Nikolas, came into my office. He started reading aloud over my shoulder: At a talk in Chicago one wintry afternoon a middle-aged, very attractive black woman from Texas asked to take a picture with me. He carefully reread the sentence, pausing at the phrase black woman. Then he instructed me to change the sentence immediately. Take out the word black. It doesnt matter, Mom.
Somewhat surprised by Nikos demand, I tried to explain to him that the adjective was useful because it linked back to an incident in 1993, when President Clinton nominated me to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and then pulled my nomination without a Senate confirmation hearing, following controversy about law review articles I had written. I explained that because I continued to speak out in the face of criticism, I became an unexpected symbol to many black people who wanted to associate themselves with my refusal to be silenced.
Niko persisted. So I asked my son: Well, what should I say? Would you feel better if I had written: An attractive person from Texas asked to take a picture with me? He said, No, she is a woman. Why, I asked, does it matter that she is a woman but not a black woman? Niko did not hesitate to draw a distinction. You cannot just write a person, because there is still sexual abuse. He had learned all about sexual abuse in school, and he offered to demonstrate what he meant. Pretend we are walking down the street, he said, swaggering toward me. If I touched you in ways you didnt like, that would be sexual abuse. I shouldnt do that to you.
Okay, I said. Now let me demonstrate racial abuse. Lets walk back down that same street. Just as I passed Niko, I looked him straight in the eyes and almost spit out, You ugly nigger! He jumped backward, afraid. You called me the N word, Mom, he said, accusingly. Yes, I did. Thats racial abuse. He paused, reflecting a moment. Then he almost whispered, Mom, will someone ever call me that? I was torn. I did not want to mislead my son, yet I was sad to scare him so early in his life. Reluctantly, I said, Im afraid that is possible. Niko whimpered, Mom, you just made me wish I was white! Why? I asked. Because if I was white, no one would call me nigger.
My son was able to see woman as a real category in part because his Germantown Quaker education schooled him to take seriously sexual but not racial differences. He, as a male, was being trained about sexual abuse. In the context of gender relations, Nikos teachers were imposing boundaries, not erasing them. But while the Friends School Quakers were using boundaries to articulate difference and clarify rules of conduct between boys and girls, when it came to race they were teaching Niko that the category itself should be erased. He was being educated to internalize the colorblind norm: race somehow was different. Gender roles, gender differences had borders that must be policed. As with any border, there were clear rules about permissible crossings. But unlike gender, racial identity or racial difference was not supposed to exist and thus needed no fences.
In fact, what was being policed here was noticing that there were differences at all. He could confront the limitations of his privilege as a boy toward girls, but neither he nor his teachers wanted to be reminded of his differences as a black student in a majority-white environment. If we were to make people aware of racial differences, simply by noticing we would reintroduce the illusion of race and thus inevitably polarize and divide or, perhaps even worse, stigmatize. With race, differencewhich was to be fearedhad to be negated and conflict thus avoided.
Many whites, like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, invariably express grave concerns with naming race as a legitimate public identity. Those who oppose race-consciousness believe that highlighting the racial distribution of social goods invites invidious comparisons between groups. These comparisons are politically dangerous because they expose the inherent vulnerability of political minorities. This fear is magnified, these critics contend, because race-consciousness legitimizes white race nationalism as well.
In light of these unpalatable alternatives, many well-intentioned whites choose a colorblind vision. Except for gender, we are all the same.
Yet, in some way, my response was just a mirror image of the colorblind Quakers. I was schooling my son to see race as stigmatizing. I was making my son visible in ways that made him want to be invisible. I was teaching my son that the only way to see racial difference was in the negative, to be called the N word and then to wish he were white. I was reinforcing hierarchy, not resisting it. In an effort to make his difference apparent to him, I had resorted to calling him names. Like Zora Neale Hurston in her essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me, I was telling my son that he was black only in contrast to being white. Hurston exposed this move when she wrote, I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
