Introduction

Extract

Colorblind Injustice largely derives from my workas an expert witness in federal voting rights cases. A vignette from one particularly important case, Garza v.Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors(1990), and a relatively brief summary may give those who have not yet read the book both a feel for its scope and a sense of how the issues it deals with impact real people.

At an international historical conference in the mid-1980s, I met a young Russian historian, Sergei Stankevich, who specialized in America and who had read and liked some of my work. In the last few years of the Soviet Union, Sergei’s political career took off, and his fluent English and keen insights into both countries won him the attention of U.S. and Soviet media. In late 1989, when Sergei was brought to Los Angeles for the first showing of an American television documentary that prominently featured him, he called me from a Beverly Hills hotel and invited me for a drinkth e next day. But because I was working on the Garza case and had scheduled an all-day appointment to give a deposition before a lawyer in Century City (which is where people work who can afford to live in Beverly Hills), I regretfully declined, saying, ‘‘I’m sorry, Sergei, but I’m being deposed tomorrow.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line.