My Sunday Salon reading this week is Lani Guinier’s Lift Every Voice. But I started off the day updating this site to run on Wordpress 2.5. I like a lot of the new features, but a few things are kind of annoying. In the middle of my upgrade work, I participated in this week’s episode of the Wordsy Podcast, where Hans Dekker, Erik Hare and I discussed a few of the top literature stories on Wordsy. Hans doesn’t have the episode posted yet, but it won’t be long unless he runs into technical difficulties. This is the third time I’ve appeared on the show, but it’s the first time I didn’t think I sucked afterward.
Now, on to a discussion of my reading.
I realize this might be ancient history, so here’s the quick background. Lani Guinier was nominated for an Assistant Attorney General position in charge of civil rights by Bill Clinton in 1993, shortly after he took office. Nearly immediately, the nomination became controversial. After a firestorm of criticism, Clinton withdrew the nomination. I was not fully cognizant of the issues at the time, but I did follow the story. Guinier was tagged by several right-wing pundits as the Quota Queen
for her advocacy of alternative voting systems, particularly that of cumulative voting. I never understood how that translated into advocacy for quotas (and Guinier in this book vehemently disputes that she did so), but I was uncomfortable with the idea of messing with majority rule. Not that I was against changing the system; I just didn’t understand enough about it and the alternatives to get past my resistance to change.
Guinier discusses a number of topics in this book:
- her nomination,
- her childhood,
- her experience as a civil rights litigator, and
- her ideas for promoting more inclusiveness in government.
The book is most interesting when she writes about the last topic. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really come until the last couple of chapters. And she jumps around quite a bit between the first three topics, much diminishing how they affected me. Although she claims this book is not about settling scores, she comes across to me as very aggrieved and personally hurt by the withdrawal of the nomination. Given her take on it, I agree with her. She was wronged. Nevertheless, as she writes several times, people don’t want to hear a litany of complaints from a victim. And to me that’s what a lot of this reads like.
While undoubtedly there are things that the Clinton administration should have done differently, from reading this book I would not want Guinier as a co-worker. Sometimes a person has to take one for the team. But she didn’t see herself as part of the Clinton team. She saw herself as part of the civil rights team. Throughout the book she tries to draw many connections between civil rights pioneers and herself, usually pretty ineffectively. My reaction in reading most of these parts was that Guinier had an over-inflated sense of her own worth, particularly in connection with the Clinton administration. She wanted them to fight for her, and they did not. She saw that as a betrayal of civil rights. There are dozens of people who could have been nominated and still not betrayed the cause of civil rights. In fact, the eventual person to fill the job was Deval Patrick, a fellow litigator with Guinier (and I believe now the governor of Massachusetts).
This is frustrating to me, because the two chapters where she discusses her ideas on reforming our system are quite good. One chapter discusses voting systems in a fair amount of depth. Things like cumulative voting, proportional representation, preference voting, and other alternatives to the 50% plus one system we generally have now. I think we would do well do adopt some of these systems for many of our elections.
The last chapter is Guinier’s call to have a national conversation on race. I’ve heard this phrase used quite a bit and I usually cringe when I do. I associate it with people sitting around on Oprah-like talk shows discussing how race affects them. I cringe because I tend to be action-oriented and an airing of grievances usually polarizes. But Guinier is looking at something different. It is more of a series of local focus groups set up to make changes to local issues that have racial implications, but conducted across the country. She has pretty detailed ideas on how this could work, and I tend to think she’s correct in her assessment of their efficacy.
If you come across the book, my recommendation is to skip to the last two chapters. Or at least read them first so if your reaction to the personal stuff is like mine, it won’t color your perception of her ideas.
Title: Lift every voice
Author: Lani Guinier
Imprint / publisher: Simon & Schuster
Format: Hardcover
Length: 336 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 1998
ISBN-10: 0-684-81145-6
Subject: Guinier, Lani
Subject: Afro-American women civil rights workers — Biography
Subject: Civil rights workers — Biography
Subject: United States — Politics and government — 1993-
Subject: Clinton, Bill, 1946-
Subject: Civil rights movements — United States — History — 20th century
LC classification: E185.97G94G85 1998
