Debate Race and the Democratic Process
Guinier, Lani
The invitation to respond to David Plotke's essay, "Racial Politics and the Clinton-Guinier Episode" (Dissent, Spring 1995) came as I was preparing to travel to Budapest to attend a...
...Race per se is neither a political explanation nor a political status...
...Authenticity, therefore, means accountability...
...This probably means incorporating some form of proportional representation to assure electoral inclusion and broad-based democratic legitimacy...
...True, when black voices are pushed back and their claims ignored, trumped by denial and silence, talk about race may become talk of separate space...
...I learned from my counterparts in Hungary three important lessons...
...And maybe, just maybe, I imagine elections in America in which, like many of the emerging European democracies, more people vote than stay home, and the use of their vote creates a politics of accountability rather than reele ctability...
...We can recognize the political interests of racial groups without conflating the concepts of identity and politics or reducing "the political to the social...
...Here, he completely misses the point...
...Thus I take issue with both themes of Plotke's essay: (1) that racial silence is necessary to forge cross-racial majorities and (2) that we should choose raceless forms of deliberation, lesser-oftwoevils voting, and centrist messages to promote progressive political outcomes...
...In my view, America's problems require democratic, meaning participatory, solutions in which we view our diversity as a distinct advantage in a changing world...
...Plotke suggests talking in code as a way of hiding the racial dimension Those running to Plotke's right practice talking in code as a way of highlighting race, albeit on the sly...
...Another problem with racial silence entails two distinct but related phenomena...
...Indeed, I have suggested nondistricted solutions such as cumulative voting (in which each voter gets the same number of votes as open seats and the voters "district" themselves by the way they cast their ballots, stacking multiple votes in support of their most preferred candidates) because it only recognizes group identity when voters voluntarily choose to act politically based on that identity!' The real value in exploring alternative election systems, however, is that engaging with and trying to remedy the experience of racial underrepresentation can provide useful lessons about democracy for all groups, not just blacks.' Cumulative voting might also disaggregate the white majority by opening up the political system to many other underrepresented groups...
...Plotke showed the students my picture...
...Indeed, rather than respond to a fear of difference with coerced silence, they struggle with election rules that recognize difference but emphasize inclusion...
...By this he seems to mean that if we rename racial exclusion or marginality as simply the "politics of losing" we will reduce race to its proper place as a partial, and not-to-be-talked-much-about explanatory variable in American politics...
...Finally, in absolute contravention of Plotke's claims, I advocate election alternatives because I believe in more democracy, not less...
...8 See Lani Guinier and Gerald Tones, Race, Representation and the U.S...
...This accident of timing gave me the opportunity to reassess in international context Plotke's thesis that talk about racial unfairness incites racial polarization...
...1. Identity politics is not the same as proportional representation of political identities...
...Notes 1 I do not discount the tremendous progress we have made...
...If we were to follow Plotke's logic, coded, safe conversations might occur, but only among policy experts within a steadily shrinking democratic polity...
...2 See, for example, David Strauss, "The Myth of Colorblindness," Supreme Court Review (1986...
...Both of these winnertakeonly-some principles are behind my discussions of cumulative voting and supermajority rules...
...6 See, for example, Jane Perlez, "Hungarians Rally to Cry of Old Party," New York Times, July 29, 1995, at A2 (quoting Jozsef Torgyan, leader of the Hungarians whose priests must obey the language laws in other countries: "A Hungarian priest, whose ancestors have lived in the same place for 1,000 years, must obey the Slovak fascist language law, which says he must give his sermon in Slovak even though his community doesn't speak Slovak...
...Authenticity depends upon maximizing voter choice as a check on the self-centered impulses of powerful, professional political incumbents...
...that frank discussions about race will reinforce FALL • 1995 • 521 Arguments racial divisions and threaten centrist Democratic coalitions have taken exactly the wrong lessons from Eastern Europe about balkanization and democracy...
...Representation is awarded based on the way black voters vote, not on the way they look or associate outside the voting booth...
...No," she said without a second thought...
...Yet, the Balkans became a universal symbol of ethnic polarization precisely because there was coerced silence on difference...
...First, they reminded me that the goal of a genuine, multiracial democracy should be to maximize participation by individuals and groups, without requiring monolithic group identities...
...more acknowledgment that progressive change depends upon eliminating hierarchy and rebuilding bottom up, strengthening the weakest links in the social, political, and economic chain...
...First, racial inclusion legitimates democratic politics...
...He couches his objection as an argument against false symmetry, as if race-neutral proposals like cumulative voting and supermajority rules merely compensate blacks for things whites did to exclude them...
...They concluded that I might be North African but was probably Italian...
...This is, again, "one vote-one value" or the principle of "taking turns...
...Nevertheless, when given a choice, most blacks do behave as a political, not just a social, group...
...Discrimination is a window on larger societal unfairness...
...Blacks are simply numerically weak political outliers...
...I'm dreaming, I know...
...Ldefense of this posture, Plotke cites the danger of balkanization—that we might become like the East Europeans I met...
...Those who play offense, who are less ambiguous and offer clearer sounding explanations of real people's problems, unfortunately prevail...
...While there are many and various "black communities," "the ubiquitous experience of racism provides the basis for group solidarity," even as "differences of gender, class, geography, and political affiliations keep blacks apart...
...they want in, not out...
...The day Toni Morrison learned she won the Nobel prize for literature, a Swedish radio reporter asked whether she now felt more optimistic about race relations in America...
...Plotke and I agree that democratic political procedures should enhance shared values across racial groups...
...So while Plotke may seek to encode his message in the language of universal reform, the other party attacks that very message in the language of race...
...For now...
...Plotke urges us not to speak of "canary rights...
...Experience: The Uses of Political Synecdoche (unpublished manuscript June 1995...
...Those who repeatedly lose in a winner-take-all system have no incentive to continue to play the game...
...And the students' answers teach him something of lasting value about the importance of changing material conditions through democratic means...
...In sum, I, too, have a dream...
...What I did ask was: where are you going and how do you intend to get there...
...FALL • 1995 • 523 Arguments This is not to say that Slovakia or Hungary are perfect places...
...He considers blacks primarily a social group, who may or may not have political interests in common...
...1768, 1817 (1992...
...After viewing the visual evidence, they tried to designate my ethnicity...
...Second, I learned that those, like Plotke, who fear © Copyright Lani Guinier, 1995...
...Second, the experience of engaging with the problems of the black community can be politically inclusive...
...Certainly Plotke is correct that race is not a universal signifier...
...In the interest of what I can only describe as faux racial unity, Plotke is sympathetic to those who urge us not to speak of race in order to keep a progressive coalition of whites and blacks functioning in a way that will help Democrats of moderate to liberal persuasion to get elected...
...The invitation to respond to David Plotke's essay, "Racial Politics and the Clinton-Guinier Episode" (Dissent, Spring 1995) came as I was preparing to travel to Budapest to attend a conference hosted by Eastern and Central European academics and politicians...
...Accountability to one's constituents does not foreclose accountability to a larger purpose or a commitment to deliberation and collaboration about a common good...
...I imagine David Plotke returning to Hungary with his visual artifacts...
...It is politics, not race, he insists...
...Welfare reform, crime, immigration, all become racialized or "blackened" to the advantage of those doing the scapegoating...
...Black people have become the way in which we talk about poor people," which makes conversations about race "hidden and covert...
...They do not labor under the hubristic attachment of a "mature electoral democracy" to its longstanding electoral techniques, even where those techniques have been shown to be less representative than the demands of legitimacy might be said to allow...
...Americans of all hues respond to the fact that they are objects not subjects by simply staying home...
...In my work, therefore, I make three claims...
...Theirs is a solution that seeks to include all citizens through proportional representation of ethnic minorities...
...between the appearance and customs of an overarching national identity, on the one hand, and the importance of recognizing rather than submerging ethnic groups on the other...
...3 Rather than recite the legions of consistent statistical and anecdotal data here, I merely refer the reader to several excellent works, including Michael Dawson's Behind the Mule, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid, and Andrew Hacker's Two Nations...
...These lessons about not submerging differences are worlds apart from the lessons we ascribe to them...
...It is to say that many Central and Eastern Europeans have learned from their own experience with artificially or militaristically imposed silence...
...See, for example, The Tyranny of the Majority, pp...
...There a physically black workingclass man identified politically with a racially ambiguous looking female law professor...
...Turnout in winner-take-all elections in the United States is lower than in those West524 • DISSENT Arguments ern, Central, and Eastern European democracies that use versions of proportional representation...
...Yet, even today, I believe that "race remains a central factor in people's lives...
...To talk honestly about race would wreak havoc with Clinton's fragile, centrist coalition...
...Rather, we must use the experience of the canary as a warning to assess the conditions of the mines more generally...
...Plotke concludes that the rigid character of racial categories in the United States means racial denial or racial deceit are necessary elements of progressive coalitions...
...A politics of always losing is a politics of a passive electorate...
...Moreover, by contrast to balkanist separatism, dissatisfied minority groups inAmerica are clamoring for inclusion, not separation...
...more conversation, not less...
...My experience in the West Philadelphia parking lot is instructive...
...Plotke understands this in the abstract...
...Moreover, he urges us to avoid the concepts of identity and authenticity, since "both terms refer to a political interpretation of a social groups' experience" and "presume tight links between social experience and political views" (my emphasis...
...The experience of the Balkans shows that recognizing difference is an essential precondition to meaningful collaboration...
...Being silent may feel more racially tolerant, but it amounts to the same thing - a conversation about race in which we never use the "r" word...
...To encourage voter participation, therefore, I argue that (a) it is important to think in terms of one vote-one value—every voter (one vote) should have a chance to vote for someone who gets elected (one value)—and (b) that someone 522 • DISSENT Arguments who gets elected should be chosen by and accountable to the voters he or she represents (that is, authentic...
...L. Rev...
...A strategy in which white progressives tolerate the continuous isolation of black coalition partners paralyzes blacks and tongue-ties whites...
...See Regina Austin, "The Black Community," 65 S.Cal...
...Prohibitions on celebrating ethnic customs or speaking native languages fanned the flames of ethnocentrism.' Minorities articulated separatism to protect their sense of self and sense of place...
...But this time he shows the students pictures of the actual conditions so many poor white, black, brown, and yellow people face inAmerica and asks, "What color is this...
...The experience of perpetual losers or losers who are only nominally represented by others is alienating and destabilizing...
...You were too black.You were just too black:' Using the language of race, the attendant told me that we are not our color or our gene pool...
...Plotke challenges the idea that racial categories have political significance...
...Blacks function as the miner's canary—the fragile bird that suffocates first from the poisoned gas in the metaphorical mines...
...Indeed, elections won without either a clear link to governance or an energized grassroots base become empty public relations victories...
...But he objects to remedies that might enhance the political efficacy of minority representatives...
...Isolated by right-wing racial appeals, people of color gain little from centrist-right coalitions precisely because race divides us...
...Racial silence reinforces rather than erases racial categories...
...What it does preempt is the individual-centered politics of "the permanent campaign" in which elected officials are preoccupied with their own personal, public relations success...
...Even many black nationalists claim reparations in the form of forty acres and a mule, not a return ticket to a lost homeland...
...They failed to "authenticate" my black American identity because ethnicity, not race, is their dominant frame of reference...
...Starting with the controversy over my nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights, Plotke argues that a candid conversation about race is inadvisable, because I, like other black intellectuals, overstate the role of race and emphasize racial exclusion instead of simple political weakness...
...Thus he thinks my advocacy of race-neutral electoral arrangements to represent black political interests is divisive and politically naive...
...In that conversation, the forces of silence cede all the space to the forces of bigotry...
...That phrase is not mine but Vernon Jordan's, who, in a recent speech observed, "We often seem to suffer from a collective amnesia....We want to think of ourselves as a color-blind society, but racial stereotyping is pervasive and race remains a central factor in people's lives...
...The importance of remedying winner-take-all elections or racially polarized politics is that hypermajoritarian and adversarial forms of representation disable all American voters, not just blacks.' Exaggerating the power of geographic majorities, inviting incumbents to assemble constituents in safe seats (so that candidates pick like-minded voters rather than voters choosing like-minded representatives), and encouraging up or down votes in which those who win get all the power and those who lose get nothing: all this demobilizes the electorate generally...
...they don't worry about the threshold issue of whether to include those ethnic groups as groups Unlike here, they understand the need to tinker with election techniques in order to accomplish political inclusion and secure the overall legitimacy of the system...
...Although my interlocutor had not gotten the title exactly right, I nodded to affirm his basic assessment of my "dis-appointment...
...155-56...
...5 Since numerically weak but politically intense groups can gain electoral representation, proportional and semiproportional systems provide incentives for local, grassroots organizations to educate voters and sustain voter mobilization...
...Likewise, they were unfamiliar with the infamous American one-drop rule, where one drop of black blood makes me "black...
...But such talk is mainly talk, made more powerful and threatening by the media attention it generates...
...98-101...
...16-18...
...We differ, however, on the tactics to be deployed in support of these projects, particularly whether to conceal the role of race...
...In political context, "race" can become code for a deliberative and participatory politics of new ideas.' In particular, seeking to solve examples of racial discrimination can be the thin end of the wedge—finding race-neutral electoral systems that include those who have been excluded can become the basis for a new kind of politics in which all voters' votes count and in which all voters vote for someone who can get elected...
...Plotke seeks to present a more "balanced judgment about current inequalities...
...This suggests the basic problem with Plotke's racial aversion strategy...
...Slovakians worry whether to have higher thresholds for combined or aggregated minority groups than for single parties...
...Indeed, it is because they finally recognize the need to include minority groups in their government in order to be legitimate democratic nation states that most of these countries have adopted proportional or semi-proportional election systems of the sort I proposed...
...Therefore, Plotke concludes that President Bill Clinton correctly assessed his own political viability when he withdrew the nomination without a Senate hearing...
...Plotke knows this, but he attacks those who name the racial nature of losing...
...what we think is not the same as what we look like...
...They now perceive a world of difference between the technical act of holding elections and the art of governing in a multi-ethnic society...
...more involvement of ordinary people and less reliance on professional politicians or experts...
...7 Contrary to Plotke's analysis, I argue that cumulative voting and supermajority (minority veto) rules are arrangements that foster representation of black political interests in ways that promote more inclusive, accurate and politically open representation and debate across racial lines...
...The problem of "race" in the Balkans, a problem derived in large part from the artificiality of many national boundaries, is a problem with which these states now grapple, by explicitly recognizing for the first time the constitutional rights of groups...
...Anne Phillips, "Descriptive Representation Revisited: Addressing the social composition of the legislative assembly," paper delivered at the Conference on Political Parties and Representation, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, June 16-17, 1995, p.14...
...Third, winning in an adversarial, winnertake-all environment, without changing the terms and conditions of the debate, does little for most of the constituents Plotke and I both care about...
...From where I sit in the United States, anyway, race matters overtly to those people who have historically been racialized (people of color).' It also matters covertly to those whose colorlessness is the result of historical privilege that allowed color not to matter and among those who have cultivated a willful blindness to the continuing impacts of color in a genuine desire to be inclusive.' Once I got to Hungary, I did not ask my hosts to guess my race because, unlike Plotke, I did not worry about how people there designated me...
...We also both believe that progressive political strategies depend on building crossracial majorities...
...The Slovakians, for example, require minor parties to obtain a certain percentage of the vote before they will be accorded legislative seats proportionate to their vote total...
...That graduate students in Hungary and a parking attendant in West Philadelphia can look at the same person and see different people should not surprise...
...He may have a point about the polarized nature of discourse based primarily on special interests or identity politics, but the solution is not to ignore the canary's signals...
...These other groups are not necessarily geographically concentrated, nor is their political potential enhanced or even recognized by contemporary patterns of incumbent-controlled winnertake-all districting...
...He then got very excited and continued the exchange, pumping both his arms in the air for emphasis...
...Such groups include women, gays and lesbians, environmentalists, and rural poor people...
...Likewise, all data I have ever seen assessing voting behavior supports the conclusion that most American blacks behave in ways that are politically cohesive.' The challenge is to empower the electoral choices of black voters without drawing political boundary lines that posit a fixed, almost natural, boundary around something, such as racial identity, which is in fact not stable...
...Nondistricted election rules enable multiple, minor parties to participate and prevail...
...Experimenting with graduate students in Hungary, Plotke ostensibly uncovered tangible proof that race talk is inevitably coercive and divisive...
...2. The lessons of balkanization suggest that compulsory suppression of racial or ethnic difference is disruptive and polarizing...
...In this electoral strategy, the payoff to blacks and other people of color is admittedly modest...
...After all, in the postmodern world, where you sit determines what you see...
...See also Michael R. Geroe and Thomas K. Gump, "Hungary and a New Paradigm for the Protection of Ethnic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe," 32 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 673, 681-701 (1995) (documenting a historic pattern of limiting use of minority languages, denying ethnic minorities the right to assemble for social, cultural, or political purposes, and fracturing the geographic regions inhabited by ethnic minorities to dilute their political power...
...While the Eastern and Central Europeans talk about politics and dream of democracy, we talk about elections and dream about winning We spend little time imagining ways in which electoral victories translate into governing alliances that do things that matter...
...between calling oneself a democracy and the work necessary to cultivate a civil tradition of political society...
...4 See The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness FALL • 1995 • 525 Arguments in Representative Democracy (Free Press, 1994...
...I know why you didn't get that job," he announced...
...Consequently, identity politics may be an incomplete and misleading account of political struggle...
...That attention highlights the "alien" quality of black life rather than its American quality, and it reinforces the political isolation that many blacks, even in Plotke's calculus, already feel...
...Urging blacks to settle for watered-down representation or lesser-of-two-evils voting is an across-theboard recipe for declining voter turnout and voter trust in politicians and government...
...They may also lessen incentives for negative campaigning, promote voter turnout generally by making electoral campaigns more competitive, and help shift the emphasis from individual, professional politicians to interest-based coalitions and local organizations...
...Not too long after reading Plotke's vignette, I happened to be in a West Philadelphia parking lot, when the attendant, a dark-skinned black man in his early thirties, shouted to me from a distance of two hundred feet, "Are you the one that was supposed to be appointed to Clinton's cabinet...
...in other words race, as a political interest, can and often does transcend class, gender, and color...
...the experience of racial minorities is "the miner's canary": a visible sign of deeper problems within a democracy...
...The clarity of their message is informed by their winking use of racial signals...
...Blacks should vote, get elected, and be an influential part of governing majorities...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
