Lani Guinier

Mm-hmm.

But that quote was from Lani Guinier, and I thought that was very, very appropriate based on what you were talking about in your essay.

So now the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.

Hmm.

Well, let's start there.

So Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, both fantastic law professors, once wrote that people of color are often the canary in the coal mine-

Yeah

... for injustices, which is to say that people of color may experience it first, but it ultimately then trickles down-

I think we may even use that language.

We're thinking of Lani Guinier's work.

I think that it's important to focus on them some, to kind of think about alternatives.

So tragic realism, I mean, gosh, I was depressed at the end of those comments.

Democrats, with their signature concern for minority rights, had additional reasons to distrust straightforward majority rule.

The legal theorist Lani Guinier argued in the 1990s that winner-take-all elections endangered Black individuals like her, who made up only 10% of voters.

Thinking along the lines that John C. Calhoun once had, she considered alternative voting systems that could guard against, quote, the tyranny of the majority.

Guinier's more exotic ideas stirred controversy.