Yesterday, Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier presented a lecture entitled “Racial Literacy and Post-Racial Blindness: Where Should the Law Go From Here?” After graduating from Radcliffe College and Yale Law School, Guinier devoted her life and career to advocacy for civil rights and racial fairness.
MHN: Mount Holyoke has one of the highest percentages of international students and students of color and is highly accommodating of diversity. What do you hope students will draw out of the lecture?
GUINIER: It’s interesting you precede the question with comment on international students, because by virtue of that diversity, each person is going to get something different. I think in particular, it’s very hard for the international students who have not studied the history of the USA to appreciate the complexity of race relations in this country. Rulings in the supreme court such as the Dred Scott decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson…These are problematic commitments that we as a country have distanced ourselves from, but haven’t acknowledged the degree to which those commitments are embedded in the structure of some of the most powerful institutions in the country and are also part of our cultural heritage.
MHN: You attended (now defunct) women’s college Radcliffe College. Did a women’s undergraduate education benefit you?
GUINIER: Well, Radcliffe College was really only a women’s college in the sense that women were housed in separate dorms and we weren’t allowed to wear pants on campus. We graduated with a Harvard degree but were second-class citizens at Harvard.
MHN: Do you think a women’s education is relevant in today’s society?
GUINIER: It depends. For many women, it clearly is a benefit to attend a women’s college. I know many graduates of Spelman, and there is a sense of confidence and competence that many women derive from being in an environment that has high expectations that they can perform.
MHN: Many of our students here want to embark on a career that is for a good cause. What motivates you to continue your work on civil rights in the midst of continual criticism?
GUINIER: I was just reading some of Dr. Martin Luther King’s quotes, and one of the things he said was that it was really important to have people who are disciplined nonconformists, who are committed to the cause of justice. I think that’s an interesting juxtaposition, of discipline, meaning you establish certain rules or boundaries, but you’re a non conformist in that the rules are not necessarily those that dominate the institutions in which you find yourself. I think I became a disciplined nonconformist in part because of my experience in an interracial family, and growing up in such a family, and also because of my father’s experience as a labor organizer and advocate. It was in my genes. I get a lot of pleasure and pride in connecting with the next generation.
MHN: If you could sit next to anyone on a bus, who would it be and why?
GUINIER: There are a lot of people I wish I had known, to be able to sit with them and learn from them. One of them is W. E. B. DuBois, there is Dr. Martin Luthur King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer…I also had the pleasure of meeting Constance Baker Motley.
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