April 2,
2007
Civil rights scholars Guinier, Torres present new
lecture series
Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and Latino rights
expert Gerald Torres will speak in this inaugural year of the
Frederick Douglass Lectures and examine the themes of power and social
change.
Guinier, one of the best-known American intellectuals
on issues of race, gender, and democratic decision-making, will talk at 2
p.m. on Tuesday, April 17, in the Interfaith Chapel. Torres, the Bryant
Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin, will lecture at 3
p.m. on Monday, April 16, in the Hawkins-Carlson Room of Rush Rhees
Library.
Their public addresses honor the historic activist and
orator Frederick Douglass and are sponsored by the Frederick Douglass
Institute for African and African-American Studies. Both talks are free and
open to the public.
“I happen to think that all of our scholarship
is autobiographical,” Guinier, the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at
Harvard and the school’s first African-American woman tenured
professor, told a large Meliora Weekend audience last fall at the first
Frederick Douglass Lecture. She recounted how in 1993 she was nominated to
head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and how
her nomination “went up in flames” and President Bill Clinton
withdrew it.
Roger Wilkins, journalist and historian, once told her:
“Americans don’t like victims. You have to become a woman with
a cause, not a grievance,” Guinier told her Rochester audience in
October. “The notion for me was to remember that all that had
happened to me was of insignificant importance compared to what was
happening to millions of Americans every day,” she said. She went on
to describe how people’s own experiences can be symbolic of larger
problems that others are facing.
Guinier’s earlier presentation and the upcoming
lectures are built on “the motif of ‘linked fates’ and
how interdependent people are,” says Jeffrey Allen Tucker, director
of the Frederick Douglass Institute and associate professor of English.
Torres, an expert in environmental law who served as deputy assistant
attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the
U.S. Department of Justice, will focus on “Linked Fates and Lunch
Counter Stories: The Necessity of Collective Action”; Guinier’s
lecture is titled “Linked Fate: Democratizing Power to Social
Change.”
Oxford University Press will publish the remarks of
Guinier and Torres as The Frederick
Douglass Lectures at the University of Rochester. These biannual lectures are intended “to recognize a
scholar who has made a profound contribution to the study of African or
African-American Studies and contribute meaningfully to an academic field
that speaks uniquely to the issues of diversity, diaspora, nation, race,
and identity that continue to be among the most important faced by our
institution, our society, and our world,” says Tucker.
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