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Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, & Transforming Democracy
The following is a transcript of the closing plenary address of the 2005 annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and universities. The framework for this speech is further elaborated in the book Lani Guinier coauthored with Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002). Guinier is developing the concept of democratic merit as part of her current project, Meritocracy, Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race, and Higher Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich (forthcoming from Harvard University Press, 2006).-EDITOR
I WANT TO BUILD ON THE TITLE OF THE BOOK that I coauthored with Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary, to try to present a challenging agenda for all of you who are here, as well as for the institutions that you represent. The metaphor of the "Miner's Canary" represents a challenge to rethink race and the role of those who have been excluded from, or underrepresented in, positions of authority or decision making in our society. Although Gerald and I start with race, we could apply the same metaphor to women, to the disabled, to gays and lesbians. The idea is that the miners used to take a canary into the mines as an early warning signal. The canary had a more fragile respiratory system, and when it started to gasp for breath that was a signal to the miners that there was a problem with the atmosphere in the mine.
The argument that we make in the book, and that I would like to present in capsule form here, is that the experience of people of color in higher education is the experience of the canary in the mines. The problem with the way we have been thinking about that experience is that we have tended to pathologize the canary. That is, we see problems that come to our attention because they are associated with a visible and vulnerable group. And then we assume that those are the problems of the canary, rather than heeding the warning that those canaries are giving to us that it is actually the atmosphere in the mine that is toxic-not just for the canary but for...