The Hope of Reconciliation: Continuing the Conversation

When I wrote "Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations," I hoped it would help spark a conversation about reconciliation among rhetoricians, so I was very gratified when it appeared as a forum piece in this journal. The gratification multiplied with the publication of responses from three eminent scholars of the rhetoric of race relations and reconciliation. I consider the affirmations and critiques offered by Kirt H. Wilson, Erik Doxtader, and Mark Lawrence McPhail essential complements and clarifications to my initial sketching of the rhetorical nature and value of reconciliation.

My response to them will be twofold. On a theoretical level, I will suggest how the approach I proposed and the perspectives my respondents presented complement one another within reconciliation as a coherent tragicomic praxis; I will also respond to specific critiques of the perspective I offered and further flesh out that perspective. Parallel to this theoretical response, I will consider several proposed and actual examples of racial reconciliation's practice, including Roy L. Brooks's Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations. I will conclude by considering reconciliation's hope in the United States.

Interest-Convergence in Reconciliation: Moral, Social Psychological, and Material

Kirt Wilson's reading of my essay suggests that I believe social psychology holds the key to solving the problem of race. While sympathetic with my project, Wilson ultimately disagrees with my choice of critical lever, believing that "a social psychological approach is not the best foundation for a theoretical model or pragmatic methodology that addresses the problem" of racism in America. ¹ In fact, he is "not convinced that reconciliation is the best direction for future U.S. race relations." For Wilson, the roots of racism lie neither in cognition nor emotion about racial identity, but rather in material interests that motivate one group to maintain its advantage over another. Thus, the key to overturning systems of white privilege is rhetorically constructing inter-racial interests (interest-convergence), convincing whites in particular that their interests are better served by dismantling systems of racial privilege than by allowing the status quo to continue. Wilson grounds this conclusion in Derrick A. Bell's Critical Race Theory, which holds "that civil rights progress transpires only in moments of interest-convergence and that every significant development in U.S. civil rights history has benefited white communities at least as much, if not more, than black communities." ²

Contra McPhail, Wilson believes that transforming complicitous racial discourse into coherent interracial dialogue will not necessarily reduce racism, since the latter is a systemic phenomenon in economic relations. Wilson supports this argument with the case of South Africa, where the rhetoric of reconciliation did not substantially reduce material inequality between whites and blacks and has actually served the economic interests of the white establishment. Drawing on Philippe-Joseph Salazar's analysis of South African reconciliation, he cites the fact that two "pillars" of the apartheid regime—the Absa banking consortium and the Sanlam insurance group—were prominent producers of reconciliation rhetoric while continuing to guard their own (white) interests. ³ Wilson goes so far as to say that "both companies were participating in the kind of 'coherent' rhetoric for which Hatch calls." ⁴

I believe this statement reveals a partial misunderstanding of my proposal for coherent reconciliation. In the introduction to my essay, I emphasized that coherent reconciliation is not "a rhetorical sleight of hand in which an appearance of unity is suspended from thin air by empty words of apology and forgiveness, while history is conjured away and the unfinished business of justice is abandoned to the rushing currents of economic expedience." ⁵ Insofar as the rhetoric of unity and reconciliation produced by two economic powerhouses in South Africa was primarily a matter of image management and economic expedience rather than structural reform, it would hardly be called "coherent" in my analysis.

It is true that I emphasized a social psychological corrective to McPhail's theory and did not stress the structural dimensions of racism. Rather, I took the latter to be a given, and saw that reconciliation offered...