Can America ever become such a beloved community as Martin Luther King Jr. imagined it, a society free of prejudice where racial differences would be erased and forgotten?
Lani Guinier, voting rights champion and former assistant attorney general nominee, dies at 71 (CNN 1/7/2021)
In Memoriam: Lani Guinier 1950 – 2022 (Harvard Law Today)
Speaking at Cambridge Forum in 1997, Lani Guinier discusses her vision of a beloved community in a law school setting. How should the terms of legal education be re-defined?
Lani Guinier was an important American civil rights theorist. She was a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Guinier’s work included professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in the political process, and affirmative action.
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. In her powerful and challenging book, Lani Guinier proposes a radical new way to confront race in the 21st century.
Standing on the foundations of America’s promise of equal opportunity, universities purport to be engines of social mobility and democracy. But as civil rights advocate Lani Guinier argues, the admissions practices of these institutions are functioning to select and privilege elite individuals rather than create learning communities geared to advance democratic societies.
Recorded in 1997 at Cambridge Forum