Legal Profession Commons^™

Challenging A Tradition Of Exclusion: The History Of An Unheard Story At Harvard Law School, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of lectures at Harvard University, Professors Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres posited that people of color are the "miner's canary" in American society. Guinier and Torres argue that pursuing color blindness policies is dangerous because it ignores racial differences that affect every aspect of our society. According to Guinier and Torres, like the miner's canary that uses a call of distress to warn the miner of the hazardous atmosphere in the mine, the critiques people of color offer our institutions are warning signals to alert us to the presence of more systemic problems. Instead of relegating the …