Interracial Justice: Conflict and Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America (review)

Interracial Justice : Conflict and Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America. By Eric K. Yamamoto. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

In the post-civil rights era, interracial conflict continues to emerge and plague many communities. ¹ ( Academic scholars and community organizers struggle with how to describe and address these multilayered relations among groups of color. Law professor Eric K. Yamamoto's Interracial Justice tackles this problem head-on by combining an analysis of how cross-racial hostility is perpetuated with how to move towards restorative justice. Honored with a Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (a national honor given to ten books in the areas of human rights and social justice), Interracial Justice shifts the discourse around color-on-color conflict to include concepts of reconciliation and justice.

Yamamoto critiques how existing literature characterizes discord among groups of color. For example, civil rights law fails to recognize the role of grievances in interracial tension, works within a limiting black/white binary and majority/minority duality, ignores intergroup power, decontextualizes the situation, and blurs the distinction between race and ethnicity. (31-32, 38-40, 44-45, 138-41) Class-based studies erase racial group agency and view the antagonism between racial groups as the passive effect of social structures. (39-40, 105-07) Assmilationist scholarship overlooks the role of structural obstacles, pathologizes the culture of non-white groups, and overstates the power of non-whites. Moreover, immigrant analogy theories focuses on minority groups and discounts the responsibility of whites in perpetuating systems of domination. (18, 102-03) Aside from working within a problematic color-blind framework, legal remedies address only the symptoms and not the causes. (38-47) Treating the problem as acute rather than chronic, legal proceedings overlook accumulative tensions that continue to fester. (1-6, 25-34) For Yamamoto, underlying grievances, racial group agency, and the simultaneity of being oppressed and oppressive are often disregarded but are key to working towards healing and justice.

This goal of "interracial justice" is defined roughly as "peaceable and productive working and living relations." (13, 48) The methodology of interracial justice is critical race praxis or the four R's (recognition, responsibility, reconstruction, and reparations). Critical race praxis provides practical tools to assess what happens in interracial conflict and to rebuild present relations on emotional and material levels. (174)

The first step (recognition) involves assessing the constraints, grievances, and the stock stories that influence relations. Recognition is achieved in three ways: empathize and step outside of your own shoes, examine the relationship with both a micro and macro lens, and sort out "stock stories" that draw from the past to shape the present. (178-79) The second tool (responsibility) centers on group agency and accountability by acknowledging how a non-white group can be both dominated and dominate other non-whites. (185) The third concept (reconstruction) involves concrete action through the mutual acts of apologizing and forgiving. Through this process of reconstruction, relationships and stories (about the self, the other, and the relationship between the self and the other) are overhauled. (191) Finally, reparations moves justice from the emotional field to also the material and structural where groups deconstruct institutional barriers or "suppor(t) empowering ones" (e.g. redistributing land in South Africa). (205)

Interracial Justice is organized in the following way. Part One and Part Two set the background for Part Three. Part One sketches the escalation of interracial grievances, provides an overview of race apologies, and presents a case study of the apologies and redress to Native Hawaiians by the Asian American United Church of Christ (for their support of the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom). Part Two conceptualizes systematic oppression and examines how culture shapes material conditions and representations of racial groups. (94-97) In addition, Part Two explores group power, agency, and responsibility (including a literature review of neoconservative ethnicity theory, nation-based and class-based...