00:00: Charlie Rose: civil rights was withdrawn by President Clinton under pressure to support views that had been labeled anti-democratic. Though she is still haunted by that experience, she has moved on with an appointment at Harvard Law School, where she will be the first black woman to hold tenure, and she has written a new book. Lift Every Voice is her memoir of healing, the civil rights movement, and the future of American democracy. And I am pleased to have her back on this broadcast. Welcome.
00:35: Lani Guinier: Thank you.
00:38: Charlie Rose: Nice to have you here. First, congratulations on tenure at Harvard Law School. That's--
00:47: Lani Guinier: Well, thank you.
00:50: Charlie Rose: I mean, that's gotta be a highlight of your life, wouldn't you think?
00:56: Lani Guinier: Well, it represents--
00:59: Charlie Rose: Recognition.
01:02: Lani Guinier: --a certain closing of the circle because, you know, my father started at Harvard in 1929, when he was one of only two black students in the freshman class and was denied a scholarship on the grounds that he had failed to submit his photograph with his application. He couldn't live in the dorms because they were segregated, and nobody would talk to him. So, I feel as if in some ways my family's story represents the progress that our country has made, but I also feel as if there are many challenges that still remain to be addressed. And, while I'm the first black, woman, tenured law professor at Harvard, I would like not to be the last.
01:26: Charlie Rose: Well, is there any reason to believe you would be?
01:29: Lani Guinier: No. But I--
01:31: Charlie Rose: Is there reason to believe that you're opening the gates?
01:34: Lani Guinier: I hope that I'm opening the gates. I've certainly been given that understanding by the administration. But I say that merely to suggest that--
01:40: Charlie Rose: Right, that we've come a long way, but there's a lot way to go-- long way to go.
01:45: Lani Guinier: That's right.
01:47: Charlie Rose: But it clearly would seem to me this is a case of the glass being half-full.
01:51: Lani Guinier: Well, I always like to think about the glass being half-full or half-empty, but let's fill it up.
01:55: Charlie Rose: OK. Lift Every Voice, Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice. What impact did this have on you? You and I have talked about it a little bit before in a previous program, but now that you've put it down what impact did it have on you? And why?
02:32: Lani Guinier: Well, the experience was very, very hard at the time because I felt that I had been dis-appointed by someone who was not only a politician, but also a friend.
02:43: Charlie Rose: The president of the United States.
02:45: Lani Guinier: That's right. But on the other hand it was also libratory because it gave me a public platform. I didn't get a hearing, but I got a public voice, and I just got a note from someone who worked very hard on my nomination in 1993 who still works at the White House. And he wrote me a note. He read the book. He said it was a terrific book, and it just goes to show that a public voice is better than government job any day.
03:08: Charlie Rose: Well, I suspect that's true, wouldn't you? With some exceptions, I would think. But in a sense the opportunity to engage the public dialogue--
03:14: Lani Guinier: Right.
03:16: Charlie Rose: --where you're not restrained by office and responsibilities to institutions would be -- I think -- a freeing experience.
03:23: Lani Guinier: Well, and not just to engage the public dialogue, but to participate outside of the demands of our political culture, where the winner-take-all mentality creates so many pressures on people to act-- to go negative, to try to win at any cost, to win each news cycle as it goes around. And people lose sight of why they're in politics in the first place. So, I don't have any of those distractions.
03:41: Charlie Rose: Since this happened, have you had a conversation with the president?
03:44: Lani Guinier: No.
03:46: Charlie Rose: With the first lady?
03:49: Lani Guinier: No.
03:51: Charlie Rose: Are you disappointed by that fact?
03:54: Lani Guinier: Well, I don't really think about it. At the time I was hurt and wanted to have a conversation, wanted to put it behind me, but I feel I've been able to put it behind me without their assist and have really moved on.
04:06: Charlie Rose: But it would have been the decent thing to do, wouldn't it?
04:15: Lani Guinier: Well, I thought so, but it wasn't meant to be.
04:21: Charlie Rose: Was this healing for you? Because it says, ''turning a setback into a new vision.'' This book-writing, catharsis, healing, what? Closing the circle?
04:42: Lani Guinier: All of the above. Yes. This book was very hard for me to write because it's personal. I'm a private person. It's also a book that has no footnotes, and I'm an academic who likes to locate everything I say in a literature and with--
05:08: Charlie Rose: We forgive you and thank you.
05:12: Lani Guinier: And I think it has been a catharsis in terms not just of my personal growth and my sense of putting the disappointment behind me, but also of reconnecting to ordinary people throughout the United States who are engaged in collective struggle and who remind me of the personal satisfaction that comes from fighting back and that comes from fighting back joined with others.
05:32: Charlie Rose: What is the message you want to leave from this? You know? And what's the lesson for you in your experience that's enclosed within?
05:44: Lani Guinier: Well, the most important message for any reader of this book is they can make a difference if they lift their voice. I hope people feel inspired to reconnect to people in their communities and to political issues and public issues that they care about. For me the most important lesson is that the experience of many of my civil-rights clients, the experiences that I describe in this book, the experience of people like Reverend Nelson Johnson who is a pastor of the All Faith Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, and who's really making great strides in what Bob Moses calls the ''crawlspace of history,'' to connect blacks and whites in a movement for sustainable community. That, to me is the lesson of my own experience that we can use race and use the experience of people who haven't been given a hearing or who have been denied their voice-- we can use that not to grieve but to inspire and to move forward. And what Nelson Johnson has done in Greensboro is a very compelling example where black workers were engaged in a labor-management dispute at the K-Mart distribution plant there, and he and a number of other ministers joined with them. And eventually some of the white workers got involved and some of the local college professors. The governor's aide went to the K-Mart distribution plant because K-Mart was paying the workers less than what workers at other plants were being paid. And the claim was that this was because the plant was predominantly black. But what Reverend Johnson was able to do was to transform a labor-management dispute into a claim for a sustainable community in Greensboro because his argument was, if workers aren't getting paid living wages, they can't buy food from the local grocers, they can't pay their rent, and the entire community of Greensboro suffered. The irony was that K-Mart came after the black workers and the black ministers but did not sue the white workers who were also engaged in this struggle. And rather than identify the black workers as ''victims,'' Reverend Johnson and the other members of the pulpit forum convinced the white workers to hold a press conference and go before the cameras to demand to know why they weren't sued, because -- after all -- they were part of this struggle, too. And that's a way of connecting people-- emotion that can really move communities forward in a common struggle and a common agenda.
08:14: Charlie Rose: Is the essence of what your complaint might be -- about your own experience, beyond all of the other examples you cite -- the opportunity to explain yourself? To say, ''much has been written and much has been said about me, let me tell you who I am, what I believe, what I have written, and why''?
08:34: Lani Guinier: I wouldn't say that's the essence, but I would say that's part of it. Yes, I certainly am looking for an opportunity to define myself and my ideas.
08:43: Charlie Rose: Took the words out of my mouth. I mean, everybody should define themselves, rather than be defined by others.
08:48: Lani Guinier: That's right. Particularly by one's political opponents.
08:51: Charlie Rose: Exactly.
08:52: Lani Guinier: But the reason I say--
08:54: Charlie Rose: It, of course, was not the administration, but others who raised the question of ''should this person be assistant attorney general?''
09:02: Lani Guinier: Right. The others who called me names--
09:04: Charlie Rose: Right.
09:06: Lani Guinier: --and caricatured my views and said I supported quotas and I don't support quotas and never have. But the reason I say, ''It's not the essence,'' is because I also want to tell the story of my clients and of other people who've inspired me by their own dignity and resilience in the face of even greater injustice than I ever suffered.
09:21: Charlie Rose: Yeah, I know. You didn't go hungry because you didn't get to go to Washington.
09:24: Lani Guinier: That's right. I never gave up my day job. Right? I'm a tenured law professor.
09:31: Charlie Rose: Right. So-- but-- and others who suffered more because of considerations of race or economic struggle or whatever it might be.
09:37: Lani Guinier: Right.
09:38: Charlie Rose: Let me turn to a broader issue. If you could change the issue of race in America, what would you have us do? What would-- where-- what would be the first step that we ought to undertake now?
09:48: Lani Guinier: Well, one of the things that I had been trying to do if I had gotten the job as assistant attorney general for civil rights and what I've ended up working on with collaborators like Susan Sturm at the University of Pennsylvania Law School is to figure out ways to have a conversation about race that's not a political performance by politicians, but a conversation about race that invites ordinary Americans into the conversation to solve problems, to solve problems in their local community that are of concern to people who are white, black, Asian, Mexican-American, and to get people to talk about these problems using race as a window not as a category of special pleading or as a matter of individual prejudice or bigotry. Now, what I mean by that-- most of the time when we talk about race -- and I think this is a problem, for example, with president's race-relations initiative -- there's the assumption underlying that initiative that race is a matter of individual bigotry. If we could just convince people to overcome their individual prejudices, then we would all be much better off. And it's certainly true that prejudice and bigotry are problems and reducing prejudice is a worthy goal. But I think if you focus on prejudice-reduction that for many white Americans that's not an invitation to join the conversation because in order to come into the conversation the assumption is you have to declare you're a racist, you're guilty, you're bigoted.
11:22: Charlie Rose: Right. Right.
11:27: Lani Guinier: And no one wants to get into a conversation like that. On the other hand, if you say to white Americans that ''you can learn something about your own life by talking about race.'' That if you look at the experience of African-Americans, if you look at the experience of Asian-Americans, if you look at the experience of Latinos, that that's the experience of the miners' canary. That the canary is the signal. The miners took the canary into the mines to alert them that--
11:55: Charlie Rose: That there was gas in the mines that could kill them.
11:59: Lani Guinier: That could kill the miners, not just the canary.
12:01: Charlie Rose: Right, kill them. Right, right.
12:06: Lani Guinier: We have been looking at the problem of race as if it is located in the canary, the canary is the people of color. They're more vulnerable. They experience much of the toxic atmosphere first. We've located the problem in the canary, and the question is what do we outfit the canary with. A pint-size gas mask so that it can withstand the toxic atmosphere. But, if you could--
12:25: Charlie Rose: What would that be in your metaphor?
12:27: Lani Guinier: The-- affirmative action.
12:31: Ok: What I--
12:34: Charlie Rose: Or do we do something else?
12:36: Lani Guinier: That's right. And my goal in writing Lift Every Voice is to try to encourage us to think about other ways to use the canary's signal because it is a visible signal. It's a cue to let us know that we have to fix the atmosphere in the mines for everyone. And talking about affirmative action, if we look at the standards for admission-- for example, there is a big article about admission of African-American and Mexican-American students in California going down dramatically--
13:04: Charlie Rose: Amendment 209.
13:06: Lani Guinier: That's right. Well, if we look at the admissions standards that are presently in use in California, you will see that there's a great emphasis on a particular test -- the SAT, the aptitude test. And it turns out that test is not a very good predictor of performance for anyone. It is a weak predictor of performance, not just for African-Americans, not just for Mexican-Americans, but for all Americans.
13:33: Charlie Rose: 'Cause it doesn't take into account-- considerations -- A -- of cultural bias in terms of its questions and -- B -- it doesn't take into considerations of will and issues of other factors that contribute to success.
13:46: Lani Guinier: That's right. That success in college as well as success in life is a function of many factors, including initiative, including willingness to seek help when necessary, including the ability to revise one's work over time, to reflect on it--
14:01: Charlie Rose: Right.
14:03: Lani Guinier: --and the ability to work and play well with others. If you look at American corporations, they're focusing on teamwork, team-building, and you need people who can synthesize information from diverse perspectives and perhaps come up with a new and more innovative solution. So, none of that is measured by performance on the SAT. What did Texas do? Just as an example, in the wake of the Hopwood decision where the Fifth Circuit decided that the affirmative action program that had been in use at the University of Texas was illegal? The Mexican-American and black legislators of Texas pushed forward a new 10-percent plan that was ultimately signed by the Republican governor of Texas and was endorsed not only by the minority legislators but by many of the legislators representing rural counties in Texas. The 10-percent plan says anyone in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class is automatically admitted to one of the two flagship schools in Texas -- University of Texas, Austin, or Texas A&M. And this has increased the number of African-American students by 7 percent, the number of Mexican-American students by 21 percent, and the number of white students by 14 percent because the number of admittees went up, but particularly the number of white students from some of the rural counties who had never been sending their graduates to the University of Texas because the tests that had been used -- the SAT -- were not a proxy for hard work and achievement but they were in fact a proxy for class.
15:27: Charlie Rose: Class?
15:30: Lani Guinier: That's right. And so rural whites as working-class whites weren't getting into the University of Texas either.
15:42: Charlie Rose: If I said to you that it seems to me that everybody who says -- and I understand -- that race is the essential dilemma of American life, that since Gunnar Myrdal's study and everything else all back to many other scholars that it is still the-- you know, the defining issue in America, that it seems to me, you know, equally important is just what you just said -- economics and class and disparity in terms of basic human needs is a more defining factor than race in America.
16:16: Lani Guinier: Well, I wouldn't say ''more defining.'' I would argue that race is a window into a conversation that links up to class, that links up to gender, that links up to issues of fundamental fairness and the distribution of resources in a multi-racial democracy.
16:31: Charlie Rose: Lift Every Voice, Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice, LANI GUINIER. We'll be right back.