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Created: December 17, 2002
Latest Update: December 17, 2002
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Site Teaching Modules Trent Lott and the Republican Party

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, December 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Lott's Fate Could Depend on How Southern Republicans View HimColumn by Ronald Brownstein, Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2002. Backup
I'm not a political scientist. Bear that in mind as I offer my sociological interpretations of this fiasco. And then go ask your political science professors for their input.

The whole Trent Lott affair, his praising of Strom Thurmond as a Southern Leader who led on a platform of segregation (we're talking 1948, here), his insistence that he is a competent leader of the whole Senate despite his long history of belief in white privilege, and the country's slow rise against such a position offers us a solid background against which to address the main social issues we tackled this semester.

First, there's an incredible mix of knowledge about our public leaders. We don't really know them. We are asked to support their representation on the basis of soundbites and half-hour interviews. This would seem to indicate a desperate need for some illocutionary discussion. There are columnists and pundits and analysts who can provide us with background material, but they don't generally fall into most people's regular reading. I know a lot more about Trent Lott now than I did for his praise of Strom Thurmond's segregationist platform.

That raises lots of issues. I may be less likely to trust him because of the circumstances under which I have come to know him. Had I met him in a positive transaction in which he was helpful in achieving social justice, maybe I'd be more willing to forgive his mis-statement, or even to just call it a mis-statement. I don't have the answers to all this. Like you, I'm just trying to make sense of how there can be such widely disparate approaches to the basic right of equality of access to resources like jobs, education, land.

The controversy goes back to the Civil War, to the insistence of some that they were "more equal" than others. That old bugaboo keeps returning, not just in the South, but everywhere, in most, if not all nation-states. It's the old individual vs. community argument. How do we motivate the individual to achieve all that she can? How do we then distribute our resources, including those the really motivated individuals have discovered or concocted or created a market for, in a manner that is "fair" to all our citizens? The eternal question of "What is it? Fair?" And what is the goal by which I should live my life? Fairness to all? Or the greatest achievement possible to humans?

Long ago I made my choice. I prefer a world that is based on fairness and that avoids undue privilege. What's "undue privilege"? Privilege not based on actual achievement, privilege that asserts dominion and control over others, limiting their equal access to resources and success as we understand it. But that is a choice. Sometimes as we battle out the race card, focused on the daily and local issues, I think we forget the underlying ideal because it remains so often unstated.

More . . . jeanne

Let's also look at Robert Scheer's column in the LA Times on December 17, 2002.

Lott's Love Affair With Racism Robert Scheer. LA Times. December 17, 2002. At p. B 13. Backup.

Robert Scheer raises an interesting point for our discussion. He refers to Lott's "playing the race card" as a "consistent subtext of of Republican campaigns for decades, even in national races."

What does Scheer mean by a "subtext of Republican campaigns"? Consider the old term "leit motif" that referred to a motif or theme that keeps coming up throughout a whole musical piece, or a through a novel, etc. "Subtext" means roughly the same thing. It's part of the text, or what we have to say about the campaigns. But there's also a theme we keep hearing year after year in all the campaigns, not maybe the major emphasis, but we keep hearing it. That's a subtext. And it is not incidental or accidental; it is fully intended by the authors of the text. That's a damning accusation, that racism is a part of the message fully intended by the Republican party. And that is the predicament that Lott stirred up with his admittedly thoughtless comments last week. Of course, Freud might have said that such slips are indicative of the repressed ideas we know it to be socially unacceptable to let out.

Scheer goes on to itemize Republican past behavior on which he bases his conclusion that race is a subtext of the Republican campaign message.