Only four months ago Guinier was an obscure law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Now when she enters a hotel lobby, cameras go off, hands reach out for her autograph, strangers approach to tell her she has changed their lives. Last month Guinier won The Crisis Magazine’s Torch of Courage award. Vanity Fair is considering her for its year-end “Hall of Fame” issue. The NAACP has offered to create a job for her. It has been that way since June when Bill Clinton revoked her nomination, or to be more accurate–since she went on “Nightline.” That appearance, she believes, convinced many people “that there was a real person under the stereotypes…who was standing firm on principle.” As a result, she says, some Americans (especially blacks) came to see her as a “symbol of conscience.”
In recent weeks she has spoken before the NAACP, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Political Congress of Black Women. On each occasion she has advocated political empowerment of minorities, but the heart of her message (her divisive image notwithstanding) is about interracial harmony. She is advocating political approaches that de-emphasize race, most notably “cumulative voting,” rather than those that stress it, such as the creation of special “minority districts.” In cumulative voting systems every voter is awarded several votes, which can be distributed among a number of candidates. Ideally the system allows voters from the majority and from minority groups to elect their most strongly preferred candidates–at least where several seats are open. Though individual voters could still concentrate their votes on same-race candidates, at least voters would not be segregated in separate districts.
Guinier is also trying to mobilize support behind a proposal for a White House conference on civil rights, which she first broached in a 1989 law review article. She repeated the idea in a letter to Clinton before her nomination. And she has now made promoting it her primary objective for the year. “I would like to see something comparable to the president’s economic summit take place over several days where people come and testify to their own experiences, where the conversation is really a forum for telling the stories of discrimination and for allowing people an opportunity to hear those whose perspective they don’t share. I would like to see a summit on racial justice designed to engage the American people in this dialogue and put on the table what the options are,” she says.
The White House has not yet bitten. Indeed Guinier has not spoken with Clinton or others in his inner circle since he withdrew her name. But if he doesn’t pick up on the idea, she believes someone else will perhaps the Congressional Black Caucus or the American Civil Liberties Union.
For one cast in the role of a polarizing harridan, Guinier–the daughter of a black father and a white mother–has a striking faith in the power of interracial dialogue. “I’ve seen people of different races and different perspectives not only talk to each other but live with each other and raise a family,” she notes. When she and her two sisters were young, her mother told them that they were “bridge people” between the races.
Denied the chance to try her hand at bridge-building at the Justice Department, Guinier is now taking her message on the road. She has signed with K&S Speakers, which handles movie director Oliver Stone and Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. She is also meeting with book publishers to discuss two projects (a memoir and a collection of academic writings) she has in mind. So far her audience has consisted of predictably friendly (but nonlucrative) forums. She is on the verge of moving beyond that, and of testing whether she can win acceptance, despite her reputation, as a symbol of racial reconciliation.
