The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy

Racism has been an impediment in living up to our ideals as a democracy. It will continue to be a sensitive and volatile issue here in America unless we make an effort to eliminate it. The authors have done a formidable job in reframing the problem in a way to help us trancend it, come together and work toward a solution to what W.E.B. DuBois called the problem of the 20th century. It's a difficult book but well worth the effort!

A bold call for bringing people together and transforming society. If you are class conscious and anti-racist read this book, it will be worth the challenge.

Because it's the best book about race relations in America since Ellison's masterpiece of fifty years ago. By "race relations" I mean blacks and whites, as Ellison would have meant the words. But The Miner's Canary is about much more, it's about all-minority-cultures and whites in America. And in direct opposition to the color-blind solution the Supreme Court has decided the Constitution requires, the book's authors esteem and celebrate and find strength, including political strength, in our separate cultural identities -- including the separate (non-oppressive) cultural identities of whites. When I put The Miner's Canary down, I wished I had read the Acknowledgments first, then the chapter "by" Torres. This is a difficult book, it has many authors, and the voice I identify as Ms. Guinier's seems sometimes to address junior high school students and other times to address law professors. So the book has many levels of analysis, and it treats its central topic -- political race -- from many angles. These are not shortcomings, but they add up to a very demanding book. The book's real-life examples, however, are all wonderful and all one -- compelling and utterly elucidating. And the long illustration of how Greek democracy in action would look if it followed American districting and apportionment rules is simply surpassing wonderful. Then there's the book's immediacy. The Nobel Prize winning econometrician Robert Fogel has emphasized the roles of technology and religious activism in America's movements for social justice, relegating progressivism to the status of an adjunct to the latter. The Miner's Canary, on the other hand, puts the struggle for social justice squarely within the politics of progressivism. This is not necessarily inconsistent with Fogel (whatever one thinks of the validity of his argument), assuming Fogel's subject is movements in the past before about 1980 when the Big Sleep set in -- which it is -- and assuming The Miner's Canary is describing developments since about 1980, which it is. The book says something new has been happening, and it started being more than unrelated occurrences about twenty five years ago. This new thing Guinier and Torres call political race. The ambition, originality and insights of this book far outweigh its difficulties due to multiple voices and an "un-ironed out" presentation. I give it five stars.

These writers are two of the premier civil rights advocates and thinkers in America today. This book grew out of years of debate and discussion about the political possibilities for individual and collective action by black and brown women and men in today's tough environment. Their collection of stories about race in this book alone makes it worthwhile. There are dozens. Multiracial children. The forced choice between being white or black for latino/hispanic americans. Progressive whites trying to struggle with coalitions led by people of color. Alliances between unions and churches stretched over racial barriers. Dizzying combinations of social justice choices. This book made me smile, nod my head, grimace, and even hold my breath. As a white progressive I found it challenging and hopeful and occasionally painful (as I recognized some of my own well-intentioned mistakes). This book is going to be around a long time because it looks at race and politics in new and provocative and hopeful ways. People who are serious about social justice and race ought to pull up a chair, turn on a light, and start reading.

In Miner's Canary, Guinier and Torres chart a new vision for race in America. Instead of the stagnant, stone throwing rhetoric that has crippled the dialogue on race, this book lays out a blueprint on how Americans of all races can start talking to each other and move forward together. Miner's Canary builds on the prevailing idea that race is not about biology but politics. When viewed through the prism of social and economic factors versus the color of an individual's skin or the texture of that person's hair, we begin to see that social and economic injustice is less about race and more about protecting power and privilege. This book is about ways to get Americans of all races talking to each other and working together to protect democracy. I challenge those who would say otherwise to stop the name calling and stone throwing. Read this book, and let's figure out ways we can work together to make America better than any of us ever dreamed it could be.