When Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier, asked her eight-year-old son what he would say if someone called him an "ugly n-----," he told her he wanted to be white. "If I were white," he said, "I wouldn't be called a n-----."
Her son had attended a Quaker school where the approach to teaching about the subject of race was "let silence prevail," Guinier explained. But Sunday afternoon in Duke Chapel, as the keynote speaker at the Service of Celebration and Commemoration for Martin Luther King, Jr., she refused to allow herself to fall into a similar trap.
Guinier challenged a receptive audience to learn from the methodology of King to be "perpetually engaged for the struggle of racial inequality." She first entered the public eye in 1993 when President Bill Clinton rescinded his nomination of her to head the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division before a confirmation hearing.
She paraphrased from a 1959 speech by King and said the struggle for black rights would make America better not just for the blacks, but for all people. "We need to not only follow in [King's] footsteps," Guinier added, "but also walk with those who are at the margin of society and learn from their experience so we can reinvigorate the center and remake this great country to reflect all of our images."
In her address, Guinier linked the experience of people of color to that of a "miner's canary"-miners would often send canaries into mines to check the atmosphere before entering themselves.
"The answer to this situation of intolerance is not to not talk [about the issue]... or to try to 'fix' the canary... but to heed the lesson so we can fix the atmosphere in the mine," she said.
The example Guinier used of a "canary in action today" was the 1996 decision of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals regarding affirmative action.
The court ruled it was unconstitutional for the University of Texas at Austin to take race into account for admission decisions. She criticized the use of standardized tests for admission since the scores can be correlated with socioeconomic status and more wealthy students can afford test preparation courses.
"The 'testocracy' system kept out not only blacks and Latinos, who only got in because of affirmative action, but also poor, working-class whites," Guinier said.
In response to the affirmative action decision, a group of black and Latino activists, educators and lawyers helped spark the initiation of a system called the Texas 10 Percent Plan, which takes the top 10 percent of state high school students for admission to the two flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A & M University.
These students admitted under the plan ended up achieving higher freshman GPAs than those admitted with high SAT scores.
"The plan was initiated because of race, but it became [more than that]. Because of a linked fate [of fighting against racial injustice, the advocates] created a system more democratic than the 'testocracy," Guinier said.
John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke professor emeritus of history, said he hoped Guinier's speech helped shed some light on the effects of affirmative action. "I hope students will see and will be enlightened and be urged to understand the importance behind the whole movement of affirmative action," he said.
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