Racial Reconciliation Revisited

A decade and a half ago, Rhetoric & Public Affairs published a multi-issue forum on the rhetoric of racial reconciliation. It began in the Winter 2003 issue with an essay I had written. Building upon Mark McPhail's important work on racial complicity and coherence, and responding to his later doubts regarding the efficacy of rhetoric to overcome racism, I extended Kenneth Burke's thinking on the tragic and comic frames and proposed that the rhetoric of reconciliation constitutes a tragicomic corrective, with the necessary moral and psychological heft to move race relations toward coherence. The forum continued in Fall 2004 with responses from three seasoned scholars of the rhetoric of race and reconciliation—McPhail, Erik Doxtader, and Kirt Wilson—and concluded with my rejoinder and extension of the conversation in the Summer 2006 issue of R&PA. I continued to write on racial reconciliation, and McPhail collaborated with David Frank on several essays addressing the topic.

In the next few years, racial reconciliation gained prominence in American civic life with apologies for slavery by state and national legislative bodies, interrogation and acknowledgment of historical ties to slavery by various universities and other organizations, and the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. Eventually, however, resistance to Obama's presidency and his acknowledgments of persistent racial injustice, and the rise of Donald Trump on a platform buttressed by white nationalist tropes and impulses, raised serious questions about the viability of reconciliation as a frame for repairing race relations in the United States.

The present forum addresses such questions. McPhail, Frank, and I offer distinctive takes on persistent racism, with frames ranging from historical to psychological to theological—and attitudes ranging from largely pessimistic to guardedly optimistic about the prospects of remediating racism through rhetoric. Together, these essays present a rich and complex picture of the challenge of overcoming contemporary/adaptive racism and open up a diversity of avenues for further investigation.