The Miner's Canary

Lani Guinier,Gerald Torres

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780674254237
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Like the canaries that alerted miners to a poisonous atmosphere, issues of race point to underlying problems in society that ultimately affect everyone, not just minorities. Addressing these issues is essential. Ignoring racial differences--race blindness--has failed. Focusing on individual achievement has diverted us from tackling pervasive inequalities. Now, in a powerful and challenging book, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres propose a radical new way to confront race in the twenty-first century.Given the complex relationship between race and power in America, engaging race means engaging standard winner-take-all hierarchies of power as well. Terming their concept "political race, " Guinier and Torres call for the building of grass-roots, cross-racial coalitions to remake those structures of power by fostering public participation in politics and reforming the process of democracy. Their illuminating and moving stories of political race in action include the coalition of Hispanic and black leaders who devised the Texas Ten Percent Plan to establish equitable state college admissions criteria, and the struggle of black workers in North Carolina for fair working conditions that drew on the strength and won the support of the entire local community.The aim of political race is not merely to remedy racial injustices, but to create truly participatory democracy, where people of all races feel empowered to effect changes that will improve conditions for everyone. In a book that is ultimately not only aspirational but inspirational, Guinier and Torres envision a social justice movement that could transform the nature of democracy in America.

1

POLITICAL RACE AND MAGICAL REALISM

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Race, for us, is like the miner’s canary.¹ Miners often carried a canary into the mine alongside them. The canary’s more fragile respiratory system would cause it to collapse from noxious gases long before humans were affected, thus alerting the miners to danger. The canary’s distress signaled that it was time to get out of the mine because the air was becoming too poisonous to breathe.

Those who are racially marginalized are like the miner’s canary: their distress is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all. It is easy enough to think that when we sacrifice this canary, the only harm is to communities of color. Yet others ignore problems that converge around racial minorities at their own peril, for these problems are symptoms warning us that we are all at risk.

Achieving racial justice and ensuring a healthy democratic process are independently knotty problems; at points where the two problems intersect, they have seemed intractable. Yet we believe progress can be made. Our goal is to explore how racialized identities may be put to service to achieve social change through democratic renewal. We also seek to revive a cross-racial project of social change. Toward these ends, we link the metaphor of the canary with a conceptual project we call political race, and in so doing we propose a new, twenty-first-century way of talking about this distinctly American challenge.

The metaphor of the miner’s canary captures the association between those who are left out and social justice deficiencies in the larger community. The concept of political race captures the association between those who are raced black—and thus often left out—and a democratic social movement aimed at bringing about constructive change within the larger community. One might say that the canary is diagnostic, signaling the need for more systemic critique. Political race, on the other hand, is not only diagnostic; it is also aspirational and activist, signaling the need to rebuild a movement for social change informed by the canary’s critique. Political race seeks to construct a new language to discuss race, in order to rebuild a progressive democratic movement led by people of color but joined by others. The political dimension of the political race project seeks to reconnect individual experiences to democratic faith, to social critique, and to meaningful action that improves the lives of the canary and the miners by ameliorating the air quality in the mines.

The miner’s canary metaphor helps us understand why and how race continues to be salient. Racialized communities signal problems with the ways we have structured power and privilege. These pathologies are not located in the canary. Indeed, we reject the incrementalist approach that locates complex social and political problems in the individual. Such an approach would solve the problems of the mines by outfitting the canary with a tiny gas mask to withstand the toxic atmosphere.

Political race as a concept encompasses the view that race still matters because racialized communities provide the early warning signs of poison in the social atmosphere. And then it encourages us to do something different from what has been done in the past with that understanding. Political race tells us that we need to change the air in the mines. If you care to look, you can see the canary alerting us to both danger and promise. The project of political race challenges both those on the right who say race is not real as well as those on the left who say it is real but we cannot talk about it. Political race illustrates how the lived experience of race in America continues to serve an important function in the construction of individual selves as well as in the construction of social policy.

Political race is therefore a motivational project. Rebuilding a movement for change can happen only if we reclaim our democratic imagination. Because such a project requires faith in the unseen, we find an inspired comparison in the literary movement known as magical realism. This movement also began as a project to liberate a democratic imagination. We will explore the connections with magical realism shortly, but first we would like to explain the genealogy of the concept of political race.

At its genesis, we referred to this concept as “political blackness.” Our effort to develop a terminology arose in reaction to the neoliberal and neoconservative attempts to reduce race to its biological and thus scientifically irrational and morally reprehensible origins—that is, to eliminate race as a meaningful or useful concept. But it was also a reaction to the civil rights advocates’ inadequate response, which tended to embrace race as skin color and thus to limit the radical political dynamism of the civil rights movement to persons “of color.” In the view of the neoconservatives, race is merely skin color and is thus meaningless and ignorable. In the view of the civil rights advocates, race is skin color plus a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow that is now realized through stigma, discrimination, or prejudice. But to those outside this subtle debate, it often appears that both sides see race primarily as being about skin color. They differ simply on whether such a definition of race is meaningless and thus should be abandoned or is meaningful and thus should be at least temporarily acknowledged. The word “political” in the term political blackness was an attempt to dislodge race from this color-of-one’s-skin terminology and to extend its social meaning from a moral calculus that assesses blame as a precondition for action to a political framework that cultivates and inspires action directly. It was also an attempt to dislodge race from simple identity politics; it was a reaction to the cultural or race nationalists for whom one’s personal identity constitutes one’s political project.

We sought a phrase that would name the association between race and power that is lost in the current debate. But in responding to inquiries about the meaning of political blackness, we found ourselves bombarded by boundary questions: Who is inside and who is outside the category? For example, one graduate student persisted in seeing political blackness as a membership category. “Is a black woman lesbian middle manager inside the political blackness idea?” she asked. We responded that the term covers three elements: it has a diagnostic function; it embraces an aspirational goal; and it hopes to jumpstart an activist project. We then insisted that it was up to each person to determine whether she was part of this project. Action and commitment, not predetermined descriptors, would be the guide. We were not gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, we also discovered that many black Americans were offended by the substitution of “political blackness” for “race” because, by opening up the category “black” to anyone who wished to enter, this semantic move discounted the material reality black Americans faced every day and misappropriated the cultural community they experienced. In our view, these were all substantial reasons to find another term. Thus we substituted the term political race project. This terminology is also subject to ambiguity, but it seemed to minimize these specific confusions and liabilities. And while we moved to the more inclusive nomenclature of political race, blackness—and the experience of black people—is nevertheless at the heart of our argument.

Political Race as a Diagnostic Tool

To the extent that individuals have common experiences of marginalization, those experiences often function as a diagnostic device to identify and interrogate systemwide structures of power and inequality. When these experiences converge around a visible group, they can raise our awareness about that collective phenomenon. This consciousness, when it helps us identify structural inequalities, becomes a potential catalyst for changing those structures. This claim was made in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? “Negroes have illuminated imperfections in the democratic structure that were formerly only dimly perceived, and have forced a concerned reexamination of the true meaning of American democracy. As a consequence of the vigorous Negro protest, the whole nation has for a decade probed more searchingly the essential nature of democracy, both economic and political.”²

We use the term “political” to mean collective interaction at the individual, group, and institutional level. In order to understand the multiple levels at which race and power intersect, it is necessary to move from the primacy of individual status to a focus on group interactions and their relationship to power. We do not, however, mean either exclusively or primarily those activities associated with electoral politics. Nor do we mean up/down voting in the legislature or the control of state apparatus more generally.

The political race project is an effort to change the framework of the conversation about race by naming relationships to power within the context of our racial and political history. This approach reveals race as a political, not just a social, construction. It does not suggest special access to an essential reality; neither does it describe a state of nature; nor is it motivated primarily by some conception of enlightened self-interest. Instead, it offers a method of analysis to signal systemic failure and to catalyze institutional innovation.

In saying that race is linked to power, we suggest that it is linked to more than the way an individual experiences power. We mean that the distribution of resources in this society is racialized and that this racial hierarchy is then normalized and thereby made invisible. Race can be about putting people into powerless positions, but it is also about putting people into powerless positions which they accept as unchanging even though they recognize the injustice. A response to these processes of racializing power and then normalizing that racial hierarchy is inherently political.

We are concerned with the public and political meanings of race in this country. By public meaning we refer to the ways in which race is tied to many socioeconomic factors such as life expectancy, health, accumulated wealth, likelihood of completing a number of years of education or likelihood instead of spending a significant amount of time incarcerated, and so on. We describe these objective manifestations of race in Chapter 2. Readers who are more interested in the practice of political race may want to skip ahead to Chapter 3. There we explore how political race affirms the value of the group to see and to name these barriers to mobility, hierarchies of privilege, or other defects in the way that power organizes social and political relationships. We show political race in action in Texas, where black and brown colleagues used their common experiences as a tool for critiquing structures of power.

Similarly, political race affirms the value of the individual’s choosing to affiliate with the named group as a way of making sense of—or even reframing—the condition in question and then organizing both within and without the group to do something about it. Unlike identity politics, political race is not about being but instead is about doing. Political race configures race and politics as an action or set of actions rather than a thing.

People in our society are raced. In this sense political race takes on the attributes of a verb, not just a noun. People are raced multiple times and in multiple ways, often asymmetrically. Political race, as a diagnostic tool, seeks to get at the way people are placed—and place themselves—in powerful or powerless positions depending on both the historical context and their given relationships at a personal, group, and institutional level. Race, in other words, is an ideological position one holds as well as a social position one occupies.

For example, The New York Times reported the story—no longer atypical—of Michael Gelobter, who, despite his mixed-race family, marked the category “Black” on his U.S. Census form. In 2000, the census for the first time invited respondents to check all races that describe them by marking one or more of fourteen boxes, representing six races or categories. The six categories offer 63 possible combinations of racial identity. Yet many who could legitimately check a number of boxes opted, like Gelobter, simply to call themselves black. Gelobter says that by checking black, he is preserving the efficacy of blacks as a political group. He and many others see black as a political and not just a personal referent.³

There are, of course, private or individual meanings to race, as the movement toward multiracial classification exemplifies, but those dimensions are not what we use the concept of political race to explicate. Those private meanings are certainly real, but they are not the focus of political race except insofar as they are a component of political identity. Political race is not a theory of racial group membership, skin color, or other individual attributes traditionally associated with race. Instead, political race identifies a specific form of public meaning that is tied to the distribution of social goods and is thus intrinsically political. Race both reinforces hierarchies of power and, simultaneously, camouflages those hierarchies.

Political Race as an Aspirational Project

To merely critique the status quo is not by itself political or transformative. The miner’s canary metaphor alone is not the full expression of the political race project. Race becomes political when those who have been raced black in this society not only experience their identity in the form of what Michael Dawson calls “linked fate” but then act accordingly.⁴ They see that their fate is linked to others who are like them. They see that what happens to one happens to many others, if not to most others, who are similarly situated. Race becomes political in the sense of generating collective action only when it motivates people to connect their individual experiences to the experiences of others and then to act collectively in response to those experiences.

By focusing on the relationship between race and power, we use political race to suggest the circumstances through which people, without regard to their skin color, can join together to transform that relationship. Political race posits that those who have been raced as “losers” or marginalized will often be among the first to see the pernicious effects of normalized inequality. Its premise is that those who have been so raced will also be more motivated to understand those patterns of access to social power. As a result, those who have been marginalized or left out could be well-positioned to lead a movement for social justice that others will want to follow if they can frame that movement to speak to conditions of injustice that disfigure our social institutions more generally. It is at this point that political race shifts from description to prescription, from what we see to what we would like to see.

This aspirational and motivational project—the subject of Chapters 4, 5, and 6—focuses on political action rather than on legal reform. It emphasizes bottom-up movements rather than top-down technocratic policy solutions. We are not opposed to law reform, nor do we dismiss all public policy agendas or bureaucratic reform movements as optimistic or naive, although we do worry about their often unintended consequences.⁵ Our concern is that law reform and technical fixes have claimed too much of our attention. Our goal is to restore some balance to the dynamic relationship between insider strategies that depend on elites manipulating zero-sum (I-win/you-lose) power and outsider strategies that emphasize the role for grassroots organizations to experiment with alternative forms of resistance leading to greater access and accountability.

To move toward the goal of rebuilding a social movement, we borrow from the French philosopher Michel Foucault the idea that identity is both a target of power and a vehicle for resistance. We explore a postpostmodern idea of power that highlights human agency within relationships that narrate rather than simply observe change. By narrate we mean an active process of creating a story that is both explanatory and motivational, as opposed to merely descriptive. This concept of power is explicitly relational, but it is not confined to relationships of domination or coercion. It is independent of zero-sum outcomes, although it may coexist with a structural analysis that points out the ways in which human beings are often constrained by forces beyond their control. It emphasizes an element of power that is potentially generative, that can be exercised by those who create it within groups. It enables those who resist zero-sum outcomes to initiate new forms of interaction. To those who say that all power eventually becomes determinative of those individuals who create it, we respond that here the power being exercised is generative of new forms of creativity.

Not all members of a racial minority, as defined in census terms, admissions applications, or other arbitrary categories, are willing or able to generate such power. We recognize the many intragroup problems that disable mobilization and collective resistance—issues such as color hierarchy, class divisions, self-hatred, and internalized racism. We explore some of those issues in the chapters that follow.

An individual in isolation cannot constitute or define the meaning of a political space. Only when individuals freely join together to resist and transform the forces of conventional power which named them as part of a group in the first place can the possibilities emerge for generating new forms of collective and democratic struggle. Those intermediate spaces defined by this reconceptualization of post-postmodern power offer the opportunity for individuals to share their stories and construct relationships that reinforce a more systemic and critical social understanding.

The effort to expand our readings of race and power beyond strictly win/lose outcomes is not explanatory as much as it is motivational. It describes, from the inside out, what it feels like to experience the joy of human solidarity when mobilized to generate new and unexpected outcomes. Thus, political race builds from inside the lived experience of a marginalized community and uses that experience as an imperfect but valuable lens through which to view and possibly enhance an individual’s political status. The lens on that experience can be stretched and even reshaped when human beings join together to engage in diagnosing and organizing through the multi-step process that we imagine. When and if it is acknowledged, groups may move from this vantage point to join with others in free spaces of participatory democracy that resist authority...