<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Required reading for all civil rights scholars
Review: Bill Clinton nominated Lani Guinier to the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993. The move generated a media firestorm and Clinton left Guinier to twist, twist slowly in the wind, only to cut her down before she could face hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee. This was a bitter disappointment for Guinier, and it makes her a marked contrast to 1997's Black Female Ivy League Lawyer of the moment, Anita Hill, whose memoir, Speaking Truth to Power, chronicled her Senate Confirmation saga. Her hope was to stop Clarence Thomas' nomination with behind-the-scenes revelations. Hill saw her appearance before the Senate as a failure. Guinier on her part, wanted desperately to appear before the Senate. Lift Every Voice is, in some senses a companion to her Tyranny of the Majority -- a collection of the law journal writings that got her into trouble. In the early 90s her work may not have been "mainstream." It is now, and she is mandatory reading for students of the civil rights movement.Lift Every Voice is divided into three parts. The book begins with her "Trials" a first-person account of the indignities she suffered during the confirmation process, her betrayal by the White House, and testimonials to the loyal friends and admirers who stood by her. Guinier may not be a Grisham or Drury, but her accounts of maneuvers, meetings, deceits, and betrayals makes for a good read. But there is still a core mystery. It almost seems that Clinton, from the beginning, fed Guinier to the wolves. Guinier falls back, maybe too often, in recounting this tale on the device of comparing herself to Alice in Wonderland. This saves her from having to state what seems inescapable: Clinton set her up. The second section, subtitled "Bridges" relies on her history as a litigator to work on "storytelling" -- a favored methodology among critical race theorists. One of the points of her stories is the notion of developing a "communal 'we' who ! [seek] to gain power by harnessing their individual voting right to a community agenda." This communal consciousness is a key ingredient in Guinier's ideology of race consciousness, hostility to "color blind" policies, and her justification for affirmative action. Another point of her stories is role definition for lawyers in the civil rights movement. Like Lenin, who had to somehow justify a member of the Russian minor nobility at the helm of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Guinier needs to square a circle and find a comfortable way to incorporate herself, and some of her middle-class origin friends like Penda Hair and Pam Karlan, into a movement for the politically dispossessed. Guinier's solution is to use the term "Bridge People" -- shepherds of the disenfranchised -- analogous to Lenin's crisper concept "Vanguard of the Proletariat." Like Lenin too, she takes plenty of time to excoriate agents of the bourgeoisie, such as bridge-sapper Tim Humphries, an Arkansas assistant attorney general. Guinier scorches Humphries, whose delta-drawl, John Denver looks, and country-slicker cunning simply outwitted and outmaneuvered Guinier. She seems still cross from her defeat at the hands of a Southern, white, male, non ivy-leaguer. Guinier even takes Humphries to task for making her come to New Orleans for a deposition at Mardi Gras, as though this golden opportunity were some sort of sinister imposition. The third part of Lift Every Voice is entitled "Hearings" and it, too, has two major themes. The first is an exposition of her view of democracy and election systems. It is clear that Guinier, like some blacks, and all intellectuals in the movement, feels that the American electoral system totally deprives losers of representation. She sees all districting as gerrymandering. Her cure is proportional representation, which promises, she claims, more representation for minorities and higher levels of turnout as a bonus. She argues that ! the U.S. should follow the lead of South Africa in adopting PR. The reintroduction of PR to France has provided an electoral superhighway for the racist National Front, and PR-using Switzerland has low turnout like the U.S. No panacea, PR is just high-tech gerrymandering, which manipulates not only district borders, but also the number of seats per district, the role of parties, and the votes-to-seats formula. So, PR can fine tune results with more predictability than mere boundary fiddling U.S. style. That is why her favorite gerrymandering tool is cumulative voting with small district magnitudes. This will, given U.S. demographics, greatly favor blacks at the expense of the more dispersed Hispanics. Cumulative voting, which she calls semi-proportional, operates like any electoral system, even single-member districts. All favor large, geographically concentrated minorities when the number of seats is small. Guinier's nostalgia for Illinois' 3-member districts would not help Hispanics as much as blacks. Guinier's final call is for a national conversation on race. To some extent she has gotten her way, but certainly not the way she wanted it. In her law journal writings Guinier tended to use footnotes the way a squid uses ink. But in this testament, disciplined by the constraints of having to nuance her thoughts directly in the text, Guinier rises above lawyering and achieves a level of political theorizing devoid of small print. Consequently it is easy for any reader to have more faith in Guinier's seven talking-point agenda for a national conversation than in the Clinton administration's exclusivity-marred, politically correct and unsuccessful, attempts to engage the nation in such a discussion. Guinier wants, in point six of her agenda to involve "both the so-called victims and the presumed beneficiaries of racism." What this means is that she will have to be willing to talk to Tim Humphries. I can't wait.
Rating:
Summary: wonderful book
Review: In an irony that neither would be likely to appreciate much, Lani Guinier's account of being nominated and then unnominated for the position of head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is reminiscent of Robert Bork's Tempting of America (see Orrin's review). Both quickly came to be perceived more as symbols than human beings and, as such, ended up being subjected to really unfair personal attacks and having their philosophies caricatured. But what is really instructive about the two cases is the differences rather than the similarities. Robert Bork's nomination split the Congress and the punditry on strictly party lines and it just so happened that the Democrats controlled the Senate at that point in time, so he went down to defeat. However, he did get to have nomination hearings where he was questioned about his views however ineptly by the members of the Senate Judiciary committee. [Personally, I learned more of value about constitutional law by watching the hearings than I did in my law school class.] Despite the fact that his nomination was clearly doomed, President Reagan stood by him and insisted on putting the matter to a vote, allowing Bork to lose honorably and granting him a sense of closure, albeit mixed with disgust, at the end of the ugly process. Bork later wrote his book in order to explain and amplify his views on the constitution and the legal system and, to a lesser degree, to give his perspective on the nomination fight. The result is a vital and readable contribution to our understanding of the degree to which our jurisprudence has become politicized and of the dangers it entails, as well as a resigned, but bemused, look at the Senate by someone who ran afoul of the institution. Lani Guinier's nomination, on the other hand, split the nation along racial lines, with even traditional white allies abandoning black civil rights organizations to oppose her. Ultimately, even Bill Clinton, her longtime friend, repudiated his own nominee and withdrew her name before she got to the hearings stage. This, understandably, left Guinier frustrated and humiliated, feeling that she had been denied the opportunity to defend her views and her own good name. In the most affecting passages in the book, she describes how she was about to appear on Nightline when Ted Koppel told her that the next day's New York Times and Washington Post announced that the White House had decided to pull her name, a fact of which she was unaware at the time. She also describes having old pal Hillary walk right past her at the White House with a wave and a "Hey kiddo", obviously unwilling to stop and discuss the fiasco and she details her meeting with a dewey eyed President Clinton, who moments after telling her that the meeting was one of the most difficult of his life went before the White House press corps and denounced her as "antidemocratic". Guinier has written another book, Tyranny of the Majority, which I honestly haven't read, but in this book she whines on ad nauseum about how the failure of her nomination was a catastrophe for the cause of civil rights in America. In the strangest maneuver of the book, she introduces herself early on as someone who was forced to write controversial articles in order to win tenure, then laments how those views were twisted by the press and hostile politicians, then returns at the end of the book to a defense of them as her true beliefs. The result is an enormously self-indulgent vanity piece, with insufficient consideration of, and a marked lack of honesty about, the controversial theories that ultimately sank her nomination. The book spreads more noise than light on the issues. The most serious flaw of the book, narrowly outweighing her egomaniacal catalogue of what appears to be every compliment that she was ever paid in her life, is the disingenuous treatment of the implications of her view of democracy. The essential fact is that Ms Guinier does not believe that the United States Constitution, with it's system of representative democracy, adequately defends the rights of minorities. Therefore, she proposes adoption of schemes like cumulative voting, geared towards allowing the losing minority to win actual representation regardless of their election loss. For instance, if a school board district voted 60% Republican and 40% Democrat, they would send three Republicans and two Democrats to the board. Now you could discuss the merits and drawbacks of these types of Rube Goldberg mechanisms until you were blue in the face, but the primary point here is that they represent a radical departure from our current constitutional regime and are a fundamental attack on representative democracy. There is no reason that we should not consider and debate these types of measures, but intellectual honesty requires that their advocates describe them accurately. Guinier's refusal to do so casts a shadow of deception over the book. In the final analysis, where Judge Bork's book stands out in particular for the intellectual rigor of his arguments and analysis, Guinier's is merely interesting as a portrait of the shallowness and duplicity of her friends the Clintons. GRADE: D+
Rating: 
Summary: dangerous woman abandoned by fair weather friends
Review: In an irony that neither would be likely to appreciate much, Lani Guinier's account of being nominated and then unnominated for the position of head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is reminiscent of Robert Bork's Tempting of America (see Orrin's review). Both quickly came to be perceived more as symbols than human beings and, as such, ended up being subjected to really unfair personal attacks and having their philosophies caricatured. But what is really instructive about the two cases is the differences rather than the similarities. Robert Bork's nomination split the Congress and the punditry on strictly party lines and it just so happened that the Democrats controlled the Senate at that point in time, so he went down to defeat. However, he did get to have nomination hearings where he was questioned about his views however ineptly by the members of the Senate Judiciary committee. [Personally, I learned more of value about constitutional law by watching the hearings than I did in my law school class.] Despite the fact that his nomination was clearly doomed, President Reagan stood by him and insisted on putting the matter to a vote, allowing Bork to lose honorably and granting him a sense of closure, albeit mixed with disgust, at the end of the ugly process. Bork later wrote his book in order to explain and amplify his views on the constitution and the legal system and, to a lesser degree, to give his perspective on the nomination fight. The result is a vital and readable contribution to our understanding of the degree to which our jurisprudence has become politicized and of the dangers it entails, as well as a resigned, but bemused, look at the Senate by someone who ran afoul of the institution. Lani Guinier's nomination, on the other hand, split the nation along racial lines, with even traditional white allies abandoning black civil rights organizations to oppose her. Ultimately, even Bill Clinton, her longtime friend, repudiated his own nominee and withdrew her name before she got to the hearings stage. This, understandably, left Guinier frustrated and humiliated, feeling that she had been denied the opportunity to defend her views and her own good name. In the most affecting passages in the book, she describes how she was about to appear on Nightline when Ted Koppel told her that the next day's New York Times and Washington Post announced that the White House had decided to pull her name, a fact of which she was unaware at the time. She also describes having old pal Hillary walk right past her at the White House with a wave and a "Hey kiddo", obviously unwilling to stop and discuss the fiasco and she details her meeting with a dewey eyed President Clinton, who moments after telling her that the meeting was one of the most difficult of his life went before the White House press corps and denounced her as "antidemocratic". Guinier has written another book, Tyranny of the Majority, which I honestly haven't read, but in this book she whines on ad nauseum about how the failure of her nomination was a catastrophe for the cause of civil rights in America. In the strangest maneuver of the book, she introduces herself early on as someone who was forced to write controversial articles in order to win tenure, then laments how those views were twisted by the press and hostile politicians, then returns at the end of the book to a defense of them as her true beliefs. The result is an enormously self-indulgent vanity piece, with insufficient consideration of, and a marked lack of honesty about, the controversial theories that ultimately sank her nomination. The book spreads more noise than light on the issues. The most serious flaw of the book, narrowly outweighing her egomaniacal catalogue of what appears to be every compliment that she was ever paid in her life, is the disingenuous treatment of the implications of her view of democracy. The essential fact is that Ms Guinier does not believe that the United States Constitution, with it's system of representative democracy, adequately defends the rights of minorities. Therefore, she proposes adoption of schemes like cumulative voting, geared towards allowing the losing minority to win actual representation regardless of their election loss. For instance, if a school board district voted 60% Republican and 40% Democrat, they would send three Republicans and two Democrats to the board. Now you could discuss the merits and drawbacks of these types of Rube Goldberg mechanisms until you were blue in the face, but the primary point here is that they represent a radical departure from our current constitutional regime and are a fundamental attack on representative democracy. There is no reason that we should not consider and debate these types of measures, but intellectual honesty requires that their advocates describe them accurately. Guinier's refusal to do so casts a shadow of deception over the book. In the final analysis, where Judge Bork's book stands out in particular for the intellectual rigor of his arguments and analysis, Guinier's is merely interesting as a portrait of the shallowness and duplicity of her friends the Clintons. GRADE: D+
Rating:
Summary: wonderful book
Review: lani guinier's story marks the beginning of the awful, underhanded politics of smear that have only gotten worse in recent years. she is wise and resilient. it's a reminder that we all have to stay engaged to rescue the American process, no matter what the mudslinging.
Rating:
Summary: This is a wake-up call that had to be sounded.
Review: Prof. Guinier has sounded a call to all concerned Americans, not just African-Americans, to be alert and aware of the continued injustices being being imposed upon the "silent minority". Our AAABC (African-American Authors Book Club) group chose this book to review for our May session. Everyone in attendance agreed this was a most timely and informative expose on the true climate of civil rights today. Prof. Guinier helped us to understand some of the "behind closed doors" politics that go on every day. She further enlightens us on the provocative slants the media can put on issues in order to further hidden agendas. We thought, during the time of her nominaton, that she was not being treated the same as the other candidates, but, we never really understood why nor did we understand what was really happening. Now we DO know and understand. Now we also realize that we should never again stand by without making our voices heard when we see this type of injustice happen. (We know it will happen again.) Thanks Lani, for telling your story (our story), as a woman with an issue and "not a grievance".
Rating:
Summary: Visionary, Hopeful, Stragetic: Mandatory Reading
Review: Professor Guinier has seen beyond the veil which seems to have fallen over the civil rights movement for the past thirty years. Guinier uses the story of her dis-appointment (her phrase) by the Clinton Administration to expose the inner workings of the political system and clarify her views. In so doing, she lays out a strategy that is simple, obvious, and doable. While so many "leaders" have been busy listening to one another, Guinier has been able to hear a still, small, powerful voice. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about democracy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent look at post-Selma Civil Rights in America.
Review: This book is an fine discourse on what America has - or should have - learned about the search for social justice in the quarter century since the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s. Lani Guinier is best known for her ill-fated candidacy to become the first African American and female Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. She provides a spell-binding blow by blow account of what it was like to be nominated, then cast aside in the political jockeying that followed the 1992 election of Bill Clinton to the presidency. It is a poignant tale of how ordinary people on the fringes of her battle to get a hearing in Congress stepped in to insure that she never lost her sense of professionalism, her commitment to the truth, or her right to be treated with dignity. Her ideas on reforming voting procedures, the very ones that foiled her nomination in Congress, are well worth reading, and clearly worth implementing in an age of voter apathy and political gerymandering. The theme is broader, however, and in this book she demonstrates how thoroughly she has paid her dues over the years laboring for justice in America. As a civil rights lawyer in the 70s and 80s she went back to Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and other southern states to pick up where the civil rights movement of the 60s left off. Her talent for getting people to listen to the messages embodied in unfamiliar language and cultural expression is a gift to us all. Her story is full of important new insights into the nature of cross-cultural communication. She proclaims from her own experiences a critical need for wide-open discussion of social issues. Lawyers, she asserts, cannot win civil rights cases without the active participation of the public, and she calls for a return to grass-roots activism as a means to achieving social justice. Guinier is superbly analytical, a true listener, and a fine writer.
Rating:
Summary: Visionary, Hopeful, Stragetic: Mandatory Reading
Review: who come to mind include... Barbaara Jordan, Angela Davis, Represtntative Jackson (Texas)... especially when support for outstanding people like Lani Guinier is needed. "Where were they (those so-called black influential leaders) when their help was needed ... probably doing the Ostrich thing, along with the usual commenusrating that can always be expected in those little private circles. The ones we respected and would be guided by in the 60's are yet to be developed for the 21st Century. Lani's book is a classic that I will pass on.
<< 1 >>
|
