America's Atonement: Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the Pedagogy of Healing (review)

In The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited, Mark McPhail questions whether white racism is not a psychiatric problem that defies all rhetorical appeals to reason. In a recent forum article of this journal (Winter 2003), I responded by arguing for greater attention to the psychological power of redemptive rhetoric employed in the service of racial reconciliation. In America's Atonement, Aaron Gresson makes a timely contribution to the conversation about the potentials and limitations of various rhetorical approaches to America's racist legacy. As a black scholar trained in psychology, education, and rhetoric, Gresson is ideally equipped to tackle the thorny problem of white resistance to multicultural reform and reconciliation.

Gresson's thesis is that multiculturalist pedagogies have substantially failed to change whites' attitudes because they have overlooked "the emotional underside of identity change" experienced by dominant group members (3). Specifically, while discourse about social reconstruction has put the dominant culture under the scalpel, it has failed to soothe the resultant "racial pain" for whites, who feel stereotyped into a collective condition of unique, and perhaps ineradicable, guilt. The predictable response has been "recovery rhetoric" or "atonement activity" designed to redeem white identity from this alleged guilt. Instead of joint reconciliation between whites and minorities, the United States has witnessed white "self-healing" through a three-step process: the creation of noble images of the white (male) hero, media propagation of these mythic images, and real-world enactment of this implicit recovery ideology in current contexts—for example, the current "war on terror." Gresson warns that activists for social justice will "continue to find their efforts resisted, rejected, and reviled" unless they come to terms with this white pain and its healing strategies (3).

The first three chapters of America's Atonement explore white pain and atonement in depth; then, in the final two chapters, Gresson considers possible ways forward for multicultural education and race relations. Chapter 1 explicates white pain as a particular form of racial pain that is often overlooked because of white social power. White pain includes alienation, confusion, feeling threatened by "reverse racism," and various feelings of loss. Gresson notes the resurgence of blackface on college campuses and insightfully reads it as an ironic, subconscious display of white males' "mourning" a double loss: the earthy "black" attributes they have suppressed in themselves to attain a respectable white identity, and lost respect for that whiteness in the milieu of multiculturalism.

In chapter 2, Gresson turns his attention to white pain in the academy. He observes that whites "can tolerate the particular, situational, historical destructiveness that whites have perpetrated as a part of whiteness only if it is clear that (1) they personally have disengaged from such 'white evil' and (2) that 'white evil' itself is a variant of human evil, no worse than that in Asian or African history" (38). Gresson is willing to grant the first premise but finds the second problematic, which leads him to consider whiteness scholars' effort to recover whiteness as one good-and-bad racial identity among others. To some extent, Gresson grants the truth of this claim, but he ultimately indicts whiteness studies as a duplicitous enterprise that may deceive its proponents while unwittingly serving the interests of racists. The problem is that he does not offer any specific evidence to support this judgment—a serious shortcoming considering the gravity of the claim. Gresson makes a stronger case for the existence of white pain in the academy, and he recounts being asked to write a groundbreaking multicultural education textbook, only to have his manuscript rejected by (presumably white) reviewers for its racial critiques and lack of objectivity, for Gresson had included his own standpoint and interwoven narratives of his experiences of racial discrimination. Gresson holds up this experience as an example of white pain working to suppress black voices in the academy when they speak from their own racial standpoint. He also suggests that white...