The Decade's Best Foreword
Americans hotly debated the fairness of elections for weeks, but instead of
exchanging views in search of consensus, various sides hurled accusations at
each other, smeared people's characters and reduced legal arguments to
10-second, distorted sound-bites. Clearly, such a description also fits the 1993
battle over law professor Lani Guinier's nomination to be the Clinton
administration's civil rights enforcement chief.
If you don't remember the Guinier battle any better than you can remember
the name of the person who currently holds the job of civil rights
enforcement chief (Bill Lann Lee), you're in good fortune, because the best
explanation of what happened is coincidentally also the best foreword written
to any book of the past decade — Stephen Carter's
foreword to Guinier's 1994 collection of essays, "The Tyranny of the Majority."
Carter's foreword to Guinier's book is spectacular because it doesn't
pussyfoot around with a banal summary of the book in question or cheap
flattery for the author who probably invited him to write it. Carter's
foreword stands as a cogent essay in its own right that successfully defends a fellow scholar's honor and academic credibility without indiscriminately agreeing with everything she has to say. How many forewords have you read that are as equally exemplary?
For the foreword, Carter, a Yale law professor, uses the same analytical skill he applied in his widely-discussed 1993 book, "The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion."
He recounts that Guinier was accused of being a "Quota Queen," of wanting
minorities, particularly blacks, to have a veto over any legislation and a guaranteed percentage of seats in legislative bodies nationwide. He explains that she did not, in truth, support any such nonsense. Instead, she supported alternative election methods that were race-neutral, such as cumulative voting, and that are practiced in a third of corporate board elections, in several state-level county elections, and in most West European democracies, such as Germany and the Netherlands. Carter's foreword explains what went wrong with the confirmation process, and why Guinier's essays are worth reading. Guinier couldn't be more lucky as an author than to have such a foreword to her book.
— Sean O'Neill (NewsFromDC@cs.com)
