Lani Guinier compared minorities in America to sacrificial canaries used to detect poisonous fumes in mines at a speech before a packed audience in Moore Theater last night.
Guinier, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, told how miners used to take canaries into the mines with them to test the atmosphere.
If the canary died, she said, the miners knew that there was a problem with their environment. She used this model to describe the current American political system.
"The experience of women, people of color -- people who have been traditionally under-represented -- they are the canaries... They make visible systematic flaws in the mines that are adversely affecting everyone," she said.
This was the primary paradigm of Guinier's hour-and-a-half speech, titled "Chaos Versus Community." She delivered the speech as part of the College's celebrationMartin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday.
Guinier also condemned college and law school usage of SAT and LSAT scores as primary determinants for admitting students.
"The SAT doesn't tell anything about qualification or merit -- yet it determines who gets the privileges of citizenship," she said.
This, Guinier said, is inconsistent with King's original objectives of "making the practice of American democracy moral."
Standardized tests are efficient, the former attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, but in the case of the SATs and LSATs, "efficiency is trumping relevant information." trumping relevant information." The tests determine only "who is good at quick, strategic guessing with less than perfect information."
In addition, women tend to perform worse than men, Guinier said, because "women want to reason through the problem, while men or boys play it like a pinball game."
She continued to describe how traditionally poor performance on standardized tests by African-Americans and other minority groups has repercussions throughout the entire society. Students who perform poorly often do not go on to college, and are more easily drawn into societal backwaters such as prisons and the welfare system.
"We don't think of them as part of our community, but we are paying for them as though they were part of the community -- through the criminal justice system, welfare, insurance ... and if we are very unlucky, through our blood."
Guinier added that American society is "paying more at the back end to track people from kindergarten to jail than we are at the front end to track them from kindergarten to college."
Although Guinier did not offer a solution to these problems "because of time constraints," she did offer encouragement.
Americans need to learn to "convert crisis into an opportunity," she said.
