The Politics of Complicity Revisited: Race, Rhetoric, and the (Im)possibility of Reconciliation

Over a decade ago I attempted to explore "the gulf between principles and practice" that has historically characterized American race relations through the theoretical lenses of complicity and coherence, two conceptualizations of rhetoric that I believed had the potential to transform our understanding of racial difference and division.¹ In the years that have passed since my first forays into the politics of complicity, I have revisited those second thoughts about the social construction of racial equality that marked my earlier work, and I have now reached a dramatically different conclusion. Whereas I once believed that discourse had the potential to redefine how we understood and enacted racial realities, I have since reconsidered the role that rhetoric might play in bringing about "the beloved community" envisioned by Martin Luther King Jr. and embraced in my early work. Indeed, my most recent thoughts about the redemptive possibilities of discourse have led to me wonder, as did James Golden and Richard Rieke over three decades ago in their assessment of the persuasive tactics and strategies of black Americans, whether racism is a problem that is rhetorical or, to use their terminology, "psychiatric."²

Few rhetoric scholars have attempted to answer their query, but with the emerging intellectual and public discourse and discussion about reparations, racial reconciliation, and racial (in)difference in the post–civil rights area, it seems appropriate once again to revisit the rhetoric of racism and rethink the politics of complicity. Several important recent works offer insights into the historical and contemporary roots of racial reasoning, their impact on our contemporary conceptualizations of racial difference and identity, and our potential for racial recovery and reconciliation in the twenty-first century. They also offer an opportunity to reconsider some of our most basic assumptions about the ways in which African and European Americans are implicated in the historical and contemporary complicities of race, racism, and the redemptive possibilities of rhetoric.

My exploration of that implicature begins with Alfred Brophy's account of contemporary public and intellectual debates over the issue of reparations for slavery. Next, I turn to historical accounts of slavery and reconstruction as chronicled by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank and by Nicholas Lemann to illuminate the failure of law and policy to address adequately the inequities and iniquities of racial inequality. Finally, I turn to the work of theologian and civil rights activist Charles Marsh, who suggests that the failures of rational public discourse and deliberation to achieve social and political equality might be redeemed through a spiritually inspired militancy, a fundamentally Christian commitment to racial justice. Marsh offers an account of the potential for moral suasion to achieve racial transformation similar to that which marked my early work on the rhetoric of racism, and he echoes the sanguine sentiments of contemporary rhetoricians on the possibility of racial reconciliation.

These sentiments are grounded in a fundamentally optimistic view of human history and character, a belief in our potential as a species to overcome through discourse the divisions and differences that separate us from our better natures, and from the spiritual and material coherence of beloved community. That potential, however, realized perhaps most powerfully in the possibility of racial reconciliation, remains elusive: indeed, the shift from traditional to modern or symbolic racism, from the rhetorics of redemption and reconciliation that destroyed the nation's first reconstruction and derailed its second, to the more subtle and insidious rhetorics of racial recovery, reversal, and...