This may come as a surprise to people who see me post just about every thought and emotion in my head in seemingly real-time on the internet, but sometimes I don’t have words to talk about some of the things that happen in the world that really mean a lot to me. Sometimes, a thing will occur where I know I should make public comment, but I just can’t because it’s too much. Sometimes I’m just a person - a Black woman who needs a little time to sit with her sadness, anger, or fear, to figure out what it means to her life before she can really say anything.
This has happened to me quite a few times in recent years - and usually y’all just never hear about it. But this time I’m deciding to write about it, even as I process it, because part of my sorrow is the fear that you won’t know how important Lani Guinier was, and will always be.
When Lani Guinier died last Friday, January 7, at the age of 71, it did not make front page news. As I was doing my usual doom-scrolling through news sites to try to gauge how very afraid of the pandemic/environmental disaster/violent white nationalism I needed to be on that particular day, I saw the headline announcing her passing quite a few scroll lengths down. I didn’t really know what to do with myself. My brain was a jumble. I posted a picture stating that a lion of a woman had died. I told my son that the person I was always talking about when I talk about representational democracy and cumulative voting systems had died. He replied, “oh.”
And that feels like how a lot of the world - those who were not fortunate enough to be touched by her brilliance - has replied. Oh.
When I went off to college to study Political Science, I was filled with excitement and a love of politics. I first fell in love with the study of political systems at the age of eight. I was reading a magazine article at the dentist’s office about the Tiananmen Square Massacre and I was scared and sad and angry that something so horrible could happen and I really needed to know why. I asked my mom, and when she couldn’t provide more information, I asked the librarian at our local library. As I read through the articles, what little I could understand helped make the world a little less unpredictable and frightening. That acquisition of knowledge that took a horrifying event and gave me the context to begin to understand it started a love affair with learning that stayed with me throughout my scholastic career. Yes - I was the world’s most serious and un-fun child. Some would argue that I still am today.
I loved learning about how our systems work. I loved trying to understand how crop yields in one part of a country could impact who was elected to office in another part of the country. I loved reading white papers that shed new light on old conflicts that I thought I had already known everything about. I loved feeling like I could actually see the pieces of the puzzle that made up the systems that ruled so much of our lives. I felt so powerful in that knowledge. It felt like the world was sharing all of its secrets with me. My years in college were some of the happiest and most fulfilling of my younger life.
I have, in the many years since leaving campus, lost that love for politics. I understand now what the books and my professors on my predominantly-white campus wouldn’t tell me: that if you were a Black woman in America you weren’t playing a game against people of different political ideologies, you were battling against the game itself for your very survival. The entire game of politics - the debates, the theory, the strategy, the campaigns, the compromises - all of it was built out of our blood. You cannot win a game that runs on your blood without being bled dry.
I have mourned that loss - the loss of a great love that had been with me for so many years of my life - without regret. I loved politics because I loved understanding how the world works - and it was that very knowledge that eventually killed my love of politics. I can’t be mad at that, even if I miss at times the feeling of optimism and empowerment that my past naïveté brought me.
I had previously known of Lani Guinier only through vague memories of the scandal that surrounded her after she was nominated by Bill Clinton to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 1993. I remember a feeling of anger and unsafety as I saw so many extreme headlines above the image of a Black woman. But I was twelve at the time and unable to fully understand why her nomination had been so controversial, or why Guinier was so important.
When I was researching for MEDIOCRE, a friend suggested that I revisit Guinier to learn more about her - not just to better understand the injustice done to her surrounding her nomination, but about her long and impressive career of scholarship and activism.
As I started reading more about Guinier’s life and work, I was able to see why she had been so viciously targeted by politicians and pundits on the right and the left. They took snippets of her work and her words and placed them next to a picture of a proud Black woman and used them to whip up fear and outrage at a time when those on the right were eager for a win against Bill Clinton. Guinier was portrayed as a militant Black activist seeking to subjugate the white majority to Black power. She was a political pawn used by the right to damage a Democratic president, and then abandoned by the left in an act of political expediency.
The fear that was drummed up against Guinier for things she never said or believed was all theater; very good theater that accomplished its political goals.
As Guinier said in a later interview, the right portrayed her as, “a Black woman who did not know her place. I would do to whites what centuries of whites had done to Blacks.”
If they were smart, and understood what she really stood for, that fear would have been genuine. Guinier didn’t seek revenge against white America, she sought something more dangerous to the systems in power: a real voice and a real vote for Black people.
Guinier was a Black woman who dared. A Black woman who dared to believe that we needn’t settle for symbolic gestures. A Black woman who dared to call for true representation for all marginalized peoples. A Black woman who held the tyranny of the majority up to the light and actually pointed out ways that we could check its abuses and empower the previously unheard and underserved. Lani Guinier was a Black woman who did not believe that we needed to take baby steps to progress, and that if we were going to change our systems, we needed to change them in ways that really mattered.
My son asked me a few weeks ago what I thought the differences between the Republican and Democrat parties were and why the Democrats couldn’t seem to get anything done. I told him that the main differences between the parties was that the Democratic party had to pretend like they cared about people of color, poor people, disabled people, women, queer people. They had to pretend like they actually represented us. But as a political machine, they never actually could care too much or represent us too faithfully - because their power was still built off of the same exploitation and oppression as Republican power. So they would always have to be vague and ineffectual. They would always have to offer us little more than symbolism and surface level improvements on the status quo. And if anybody in their party showed an intention to truly represent the needs of the most vulnerable and underserved of their constituents, they would have to be stopped or severely limited in their power to make real change - lest they threaten the power that their political functionality within a corrupt system required. Republicans don’t have to do any of that. They get to fully embrace their fidelity to capitalist white patriarchy and the only thing they have to pretend to love is God. You can get a whole lot more accomplished when you don’t have to pretend.
Lani Guinier knew this reality with a first-hand experience that few of us will have. She brought her self and her ideas to the capitol and was pilloried by the right and betrayed by the left. I cannot imagine what pain such a public and widespread attack by the press and such a personal betrayal by the Clintons had caused her. But I do know that even in the face of such immense pressure and opposition, she refused to make her dismissal easy on those who sought to harm her. I know that when the Clinton administration begged her to politely decline the Justice Department nomination after the controversy became too hot for them, she refused: forcing her one time friend to say it with his chest and look her and the rest of the nation in the eyes as he disavowed Lani Guinier’s work from the presidential podium. I know that even then it didn’t kill her love of law, her love of scholarship, or her love of teaching. And it didn’t stop her fight for change. It didn’t shut her up.
So many who worked with Guinier in her work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and her decades of writing and teaching were inspired and educated by her. So many students who went through her classrooms were forever changed by the fundamental understanding of the ways in which race and politics were structurally intertwined in our society.
I can easily imagine how, had I been introduced to Guinier’s work in college, learning about from her at that time could have forged a pathway in my political education that would have enabled my love of political science to grow into something more informed, empowered, and sustainable. But the PWI that I attended did not offer up an education that would help a young Black woman find a place of power in this world. I had to find those teachers on my own, later in life.
And yet, even just researching her for my book lit a fire within me that I had long thought extinguished forever. No, Lani Guinier did not rekindle my love of politics - some things are better off gone for good - but she did help rekindle my love of political possibility. She helped me remember that part of why I had loved my study of politics so much was because if we could understand how these systems were built and why they function the way that we do - and how other systems in other cultures and other societies work - we could use that knowledge to build something new better. Guinier helped me remember that real, impactful and lasting change could be here right now if we dared to try something new.
Lani Guinier left us with a lifetime of work and words to discover. She left us with different futures to work towards and different possibilities to explore. As I process my grief over Guinier’s passing, I know that grief will be lessened if those of you who are reading this and are hearing Lani Guinier’s name for the first time - or perhaps haven’t thought of her name in quite a while - will take the time to go watch some of her interviews, or read some of her papers or books. I truly hope that we can look at Lani Guinier’s life and decide to be as daring as she was: dare to demand more, and dare to believe that more is possible.
“I am a democratic idealist who believes that politics need not be forever seen as an `I win, you lose’ dynamic in which some people are permanent, monopoly winners and others are permanent, excluded losers.” - Lani Guinier
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This is my first time hearing the name but I can’t wait to learn more about her life and work.
Thank you doesn't feel like enough, but I need to at least start there: thank you <3