Shayla C. Nunnally
Page 2
pundits and the American public grappled with questions about how representative Lott
and others in the Republican Party could be on behalf of minority group interests. Put in
a different way, this political event exemplified how race is still perceived in various
aspects of politics, including partisan politics.
For African Americans, it seems that these remarks were even more salient, as
this group has faced centuries of racial discrimination in the United States, and race has
been used in overt and covert messages to galvanize white voters and whites’ interests at
the expense of African Americans and other minorities (Mendelberg 2001). It is with
these discrimination experiences that African American identity has been developed from
a group perspective that links the conditions of the black individual to the black group
(Allen, Dawson, and Brown 1989; Dawson 1994; Harris 1995).
The Trent Lott controversy became the impetus for my research, as I speculated
about how young African Americans, who have less historical experience with overt
discrimination, were either knowledgeable or unknowledgeable about the historical
impact of race on partisan platforms (Weiss 1989; Aldrich 1995; Mendelberg 2001) and
partisan realignment (Carmines and Stimson 1989). Generational differences in
experiences with overt versus covert institutionalized racism may explain how younger
African Americans either did or did not understand the inflammatory nature of Lott’s
remarks. At the same time, however, as Dawson (1994) suggests, by being a black group
member, race may have such an impact on one’s political development that one may have
been familiar about the historical stances that either the Democratic or Republican parties
had on racial issues such that incidents such as the Lott controversy resonate as
profoundly as those that young African Americans may encounter in their everyday lives
as black Americans.
With a racially-laden harangue, such as Lott’s, no wonder we see that African
Americans are less trusting of government than other political groups (Brehm and Rahn
1997; Brehm 1998; Rahn and Transue 1998). The Lott controversy, however, is not the
focus of my paper. However, the implications for race, trust, and representation are
central to what I perceive to be at the core of explaining the lower levels of social trust
(Brehm and Rahn 1997; Brehm 1998; Rahn and Transue 1998) and political trust (Abney
and Hutcheson 1981; Abramson 1972 and 1977; Aberbach and Walker 1970) among
African Americans. I contend that African Americans’ perception of trust in others
Convention