The Miner's Canary, by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres

Deep underground, miners need a way to monitor the purity of the air. Before technology offered precise monitoring instruments, miners brought canaries with them. When the air became toxic, the canary would be affected long before the people. Just so, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argue, problems faced by people of color, poor people and women indicate danger in the cultural environment. What affects them first eventually affects us all.

Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Torres, a professor at University of Texas Law School, creatively envision ways to change toxic cultural and political environments so that the "canaries"--and, by extension, everyone--can thrive. Instead of putting tiny gas masks on the canaries, they say, cleanse the air so that both miners and canaries can stay healthy.

One method of air purification calls for race awareness. Currently, Guinier and Torres argue, people of seeming goodwill say they are colorblind when it comes to race. This colorblindness, the authors suggest, identifies race with skin color, believes that naming race is rude, and holds that racism is a personal problem rather than a systemic or institutional one. Colorblindness serves those who are not raced black (meaning perceived and treated as black). It does a disservice to those who are because it tells them, "Don't think or operate in terms of your race." It puts people of color in a bind and places white people in the position of deciding which people of color can be recognized and which ones cannot. "Such thinking makes all of its beneficiaries objects rather than subjects of policy."