Dr. M Kelly Carr

Objective
This essay examines the rhetorical strategies used in former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's speech explaining the city's decision to remove several Confederate memorials.

Method
The author performs a Burkean rhetorical analysis to the transcript and social context of Landrieu's May 19, 2017, speech. Additionally, the author applies frameworks of visual rhetoric, public memory, and third persona to engage Landrieu's construction of the memorials’ meaning and their amnesias.Results
Landrieu used identification, a nuanced commemorative rhetorical analysis, and a comic frame to explain both the lure and the damaging falsehood of the Lost Cause narrative that the memorials represent. He reserved the tragic frame for those who continue to support the Lost Cause narrative.

Conclusions
In this rhetorical move, Landrieu divides monument supporters between those explicitly tied to the Confederate cause of white supremacy—these people are consciously evil—and those who have been hoodwinked by the monuments’ narrative—for these people, he offers redemption. The tragicomic frame made Landrieu's speech well received nationally and revealed promise through its distinction between supporters of white supremacy and passive adopters of the memorials’ narratives. However, it did not appear to persuade monument supporters, revealing the limitations of an agency-centered approach to combating the Lost Cause narrative.

Contemporary American town hall meetings are steeped in the Athenian notion of civic engagement as a hallmark of deliberative democracy. New media offer unprecedented interactivity and can enhance democratic dialogue. Deluca and Peeples assert that the face-to-face conception of public sphere limits our understanding about what constitutes political activity and citizenship. Constituents in both parties have reported a noticeable decline in town hall meetings and an increased secrecy about the time and locations of events that legislators hold. Avoidance tactics include releasing meeting announcements at the last minute, scheduling small rooms and inconvenient times, prohibiting signs bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, and holding Facebook and tele-town halls screened by operators. In exchange for appearing before them and listening, members cultivate the persuasive tool of ethos, building trust in order to ask for their voting support. New technologies now allow members connectivity without the uncertainty and hassle of face-to-face meetings.

This chapter begins by expanding the scope of prudential argumentation to include the collaborative inventional process, describing an example of prudential opinion-writing as a model for prudential legal argument, and then applying the framework to Roberts' decision. The balancing strategies of prudential argumentation serve the legal situation well, especially because its temporal orientation mirrors appellate court questions that demand "knowledge of the past, understanding of the present, and a sense of the future". The chapter shows that within appellate legal discourse, prudential argumentation strategies begin with the collaborative inventional process through which justices craft their arguments. Powell's donated collection of papers provided a unique view into Supreme Court opinion-writing process in a publically controversial and jurisprudentially divided case. Powell used the idiom of accommodation to validate the principle of individual rights that opponents of the program argued, while evoking the idiom of audacity to pair the value of diversity with a legal story of limits that deferred judgment to universities.

Despite the tepid reception of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, the Supreme Court has thrice affirmed its holding: universities can use race as an admissions factor to achieve the goal of a diverse student body. This book examines the process of rhetorical invention followed by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., his colleagues, and other interlocutors as they sifted through arguments surrounding affirmative action policies to settle on diversity as affirmative action’s best constitutional justification. Here M. Kelly Carr explores the goals, constraints, and argumentative tools of the various parties as they utilized the linguistic resources available to them, including arguments about race, merit, and the role of the public university in civic life. Using public address texts, legal briefs, memoranda, and draft opinions, Carr looks at how public arguments informed the amicus briefs, chambers memos, and legal principles before concluding that Powell’s pragmatic decision making fused the principle of individualism with an appreciation of multiculturalism to accommodate his colleagues’ differing opinions. She argues that Bakke is thus a legal and rhetorical milestone that helped to shift the justificatory grounds of race-conscious policy away from a recognition of historical discrimination and its call for reparative equality, and toward an appreciation of racial diversity.