It has often been said that a “gaffe” is when a politician slips up and says what he actually thinks. That appears to be what Lott did, and it goes a long way toward explaining why his apologies didn’t work. Was he apologizing for his words or the thoughts and values the words expressed? The former would obviously be insufficient, and the latter .. well, how do you apologize for what you believe? You’d have to apologize for who you are, and that doesn’t make much sense.
The problem, then, is who Lott is, not what he said. As the Washington Post quoted “a top party strategist” today, “he just doesn’t get it. He’s trapped in time and place.” A similar point was made by columnist Clarence Page:
From what I know of Mr. Lott, it is easy for me to imagine how a white Mississippian of his generation would have been led astray. We Americans of African descent, among others, know very well how much damage white supremacy can cause even to those who have been its beneficiaries.
Lott-as-butterfly-trapped-in-Old South-amber is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough to reveal the real lesson that I believe is lurking here, just beneath the surface. What was it about his “time and place” that was so bad?
That’s a dumb question, you say. Segregation is what was wrong with it. Everybody knows that.
Yes, but what exactly was wrong with segregation? This is not a question that has received much attention. Why bother, since all agree it was evil. But the answer, I think, is important — that’s where the lesson of Lott lies — and it’s not an answer all will agree on. Many, like Clarence Page quoted above, will say that segregation was evil because it was the foundation for white supremacy, for one group of people branding another group inferior and depriving them of opportunity and the good things of life based on nothing more than the color of their skin.
A more analytical version of this view can be found in the argument that racial preferences are justified today in order to both dismantle and prevent a racial caste system. This view has been argued forcefully by Owen Fiss, the noted Yale Law professor, who supports racial preferences but rejects both diversity and compensation as rationales for them.
The diversity rationale seems shallow and lacking the compelling quality needed to justify the hardships created by preferential treatment. It has little appeal outside the university context — for example, among production workers or guard-rail contractors. Even in the university, diversity seems an incomplete justification, since it doesn’t provide any basis for choosing what kinds of diversity we should favor. Why, we are left to wonder, should we give a plus to blacks but not to members of religious groups that might be underrepresented?
The rationale of compensatory justice has the compelling quality lacking with diversity, but it falters because of the lack of identity between the victims of the wrongs committed and the recipients of the preferential treatment — and between the perpetrators of those wrongs and the people who bear the cost of the remedy. Nor are we told why the compensation should take the form of preferential treatment.
Rather than thinking of affirmative action in terms of diversity or compensation, we should see it as a structural remedy for a structural problem: as a means of eradicating the caste structure that now mars our society and that has its roots in slavery and the segregation of Jim Crow. By giving blacks a greater share of the privileged positions of society, affirmative action improves the relative position of the group that lies at the bottom of the heap. It aims to end the racial ordering of American society.
(“Affirmative Action: Beyond Diversity,” Washington Post, 27 May 1997, p. A21)
Although white supremacy and a racial caste system are clearly evil, Fiss’s analysis, in my view, is not successful because it stops short of identifying the source and even the nature of the evil. Consider: complete equality can exist over time only in a totalitarian society. Any society that is free, and especially free and democratic, will be hierarchical to a certain extent. Thus, since a free society will have some people at the top and some at the bottom, what precisely is wrong with having these positions “racially ordered”? As long as there is to be a lower class, in short, what difference does it make if the classes are associated with races? Fiss doesn’t say.
Looked at this way, it’s not a hard question. We’ve spent most of American history answering it. It is wrong, at least in this society, for opportunities or benefits or burdens to be distributed on the basis of race. No person should be judged on those bases. No person’s opportunity to rise from the bottom, or to remain at the top, should be determined to any degree by his or her race or religion. To wax pontifical, that’s what America is all about. If that weren’t true, having a “racially ordered” society would be no more offensive than having a society ordered by other criteria.
Thus, what was wrong with Trent Lott’s “time and place” is that it was a society that was, in today’s term, “racially conscious.” It “took account of race” at every opportunity, to order opportunities. White supremacy was the end, but preferences based on race were the means. One measure of the fact that racial discrimination, not white supremacy, is the fundamental evil is that we would not, and should not, regard segregation as any more tolerable even if separate really were equal.
Oh, but liberal racial preferences are different because they are meant to include and not exclude? Tell that to Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter.
Many liberals today appear to have forgotten (and the younger ones may never have known) that colorblindness is not an evil scheme dreamed up by a vast, racist, right wing conspiracy to “turn back the clock” and thwart civil rights. It was originated by abolitionists, and associated with liberals until they abandoned it in the late 1960s. Colorblindness was, and is, the incendiary principle that burned down the walls of segregation, and without it there are no civil rights, or at least no civil rights based on the principle of non-discrimination.
SEE ALSO – For the beginning of what looks to be a fascinating discussion of bias, see Susanna’s recent post on her (appropriately enough) cut on the bias.
UPDATE [12/18/2002] – Speaking, among many other things worth reading, of “racialist social reforms that make a virtue of the same segregationist spirit that has now brought [Lott] low,” Shelby Steele makes this point far better than I did.
A brilliant last paragraph!