Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations

One hundred years after W. E. B. Du Bois identified America's greatest challenge as "the problem of the colorline," ¹ that problem appears as intransigent as ever. Although many members of our society wish it away or deny its continued relevance, racial inequality and antagonism are alive and well, as attested most recently by the controversy over African American voter access in Florida in the 2000 presidential election and by the recent lawsuits seeking reparations for slaves' descendents. ² Accusations of white racism or black "reverse racism" fly freely in the Land of the Free, and affirmative action for equal opportunity generates heated debates in this nation dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal." As sociologist Orlando Patterson puts it, discussions about race in the United States today resemble a "dialogue of the deaf." ³ Tragically, it appears that the present generation is destined to pass on the problem of race to still another generation.

Yet this generation also bears another legacy from the twentieth century—one that emerged only in its final decade: an international trend toward interethnic and interracial reconciliation. Since the early 1990s, political and religious entities in South Africa, Australia, Ireland, and other nations have taken significant steps to overcome long-intractable conflicts between ethnic and racial groups in their societies. These initiatives have included such measures as public confession, apology, forgiveness, and, in some cases, attempts at reparation. In his recent and groundbreaking work Interracial Justice, Eric K. Yamamoto observes that "race apologies among groups apparently trying to restore broken relationships exploded as a worldwide phenomenon in the 1990s. . . . Those recently apologizing for historic and contemporary racial wounds are national, state, and local governments; religious denominations and missionary groups; businesses, politicians, and entertainers." ⁴

One of the leading rhetoricians on the subject of race, Mark Lawrence McPhail, has briefly noted the potential value and validity of racial reconciliation in light of his theory of "rhetoric as coherence." However, he has not explored the nexus between reconciliation and coherence in depth. Rather, McPhail has come to express doubt regarding the applicability of his rhetorical theory, and of rhetoric itself, to the problem of race in America.

This essay is a response to that doubt. I aim to show that public intergroup reconciliation—a phenomenon that has been largely neglected (in practice) and ignored (in scholarship) until recently—can constitute a substantial rhetorical bridge between the reality of racism and McPhail's ideal of coherence in race relations, and thus merits greater attention. Certainly, such a bridge must be well designed to bear the weight of racial differences and offenses; it cannot be a mere façade without solid grounding or robust structural support. When I refer to reconciliation, I mean not to connote 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. To the contrary, I have in mind a coherent reconciliation that works to build a solidly groundedbridge from the racist past (and present) to a more just and harmonious interracial future amid the contingencies of racial history. Applying McPhail's definition of rhetorical coherence, this reconciliation would entail "discovering, managing, and synthesizing" ⁵ the diverse social realities constructed and experienced, imposed, and suffered by racial groups in relation to one another. Too often, perhaps, public gestures of reconciliation fail to meet this criterion of coherence, falling more into the category of rhetorical legerdemain—"mere rhetoric." Conversely, I argue, McPhail's rhetorical praxis of interracial coherence lacks something that recent scholarly analyses of reconciliation (mostly outside the discipline) can contribute to his project: substantially developed conceptualizations of rhetorical actions that work sociopsychologically to move groups plagued by a historical victimizer/victim relationship toward...