It has been more than a decade since Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, and, in her wake, former President Bill Clinton, called for a national conversation on race. Clinton’s initiative died after 15 months of town hall meetings, buried by media disinterest in an event about reconciliation, rather than rage.
With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, a conversation on race began to re-emerge, albeit in a form that was more about an imagined “post-racial” state of affairs than any reality that most Americans encounter daily.
For simple reasons—the harsh facts of demographics and economics, if not for reasons of doggedly trying to better this country and ourselves—we ask that a serious conversation on race again be attempted. This time, we ask for a conversation with attention to the kind of depth and texture invited by Guinier, who grew up with a keen awareness of the need for bridge building across America’s ravine that we call race.
As a start, we propose that the conversation begin with the faculty and students at our institutes of higher education.
Why? Because we need only look around at who is doing the talking—and where such talk is leading us. We note with some bemusement that over the decades the rhetoricians have changed, but the rhetoric has not. It was “us and them” six decades ago, and it is “us and them” today. It is only through the still largely unwritten scripts of the next generation that this country has a chance of moving forward. Our youth represent our best hope.
The concept of responsible and sustained conversations in the classroom is not new. What’s new is the urgency of the need for a fertile space for new seeds of justice to be nourished.
We are at a critical point in racial justice, as recent furors over a Muslim mosque near Ground Zero, the mud slinging between the Tea Party and NAACP, and the revolt over undocumented immigrants in Arizona have shown. In retrospect, it was not so hard to see this pathos coming: In May 2008, a Newsweek poll showed 39 percent of White voters thought we had “gone too far” in pushing equal rights.
