Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice (review)

For many observers in the United States, Barack Obama's election signaled a transition to a "color-blind" society, our legacy of racial oppression consigned to history. Numerous examples, however, might be offered to show the naïveté of that optimism, from the controversy over Virginia's proposed "Confederate History Month," to a federal judge's 2010 finding that a Walthall County, Mississippi, school board policy effectively established racially segregated schools, to the fact that race continues to be among the most potent variables predicting the location of toxic waste sites in the United States. As Hatch puts it, "Civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and multicultural education alone have not eliminated the problem of the color line that runs like a seismic fault through American history to the present" (8).

Race and Reconciliation offers a compelling and comprehensive theoretical framework for addressing not only the structural and economic elements of racism—unfair laws or inadequate education—but also the "unconfessed guilt and shame, unforgiven wrongs, unhealed emotional wounds, and incompletely redressed injustices," phenomena that "persist through generations as a sort of spiritual connection or psychic legacy that is not easily shaken" (8). Based on the author's examination of the historic 1999 Leaders Conference on Reconciliation and Development in Benin, West Africa, which provided an opportunity for Africans, African Americans, and whites from both Europe and the United States to acknowledge and memorialize the horrors of slavery, the book explores reconciliation as a constellation of verbal actions centered on "seeking and acknowledging the truth about past offenses, making apologies for them, offering forgiveness, and jointly reconstructing the relationship through some combination of symbolic and material repair" (7).

The first of the book's three main divisions addresses the exigence for theorizing about racial reconciliation, the inability of prior theories of rhetoric and race to address adequately the persistence of racism and racial tension in the United States. Using Burkean dramatism as an overarching framework, Hatch critiques the work of Mark McPhail, arguing that McPhail's early theory of racial complicity was one-sidedly tragic, whereas his later conception of rhetorical coherence was overoptimistically comic; Hatch notes that both focused on cognitive transformation while neglecting the emotional and economic dimensions of racial recovery. He points to reconciliation, by contrast, as an approach that emphasizes the rhetorical dimensions of race while also addressing the need for social psychological healing and material redress. A fully articulated theory of reconciliation, moreover, combines the comic and the tragic in a way that acknowledges the reality of racial injustice even as it holds out an optimistic hope for social harmony. A key element in his discussion concerns the place of the sacred within the process of public reconciliation. Hatch draws on Burke's notion of logology, which highlighted the potency of religious language while bracketing its content, along with Ricoeur's recognition of the power for religious narrative to structure humans' pursuit of the moral life, in order to assert that "religious discourse is well suited to reconciliation, in which parties seek to restore ethical and social cohesion primarily through language—particularly through epideictic discourse, rooted (since ancient times) in holy days, sacred rites, and commemorative performances" (14).

In part two, Hatch unfolds his theory of reconciliation. First, he notes the diverse psychological impacts of victimization, observing that victims and victimizers respond to racism and, hence, to the prospect and even the need for reconciliation in dramatically different ways. This distinction gives rise to a diversity of social values that might be seen as potential outcomes of reconciliation, among them peace (or harmony), justice, truth, dignity or respect, and agency (for victims, the freedom to name and narrate one's experience and to offer grace in the form of forgiveness, and for victimizers and beneficiaries of racism, a willingness to claim responsibility and to repent for racial injustice). These polysemous terms, he continues, not only have contested meanings within themselves, but they are also often pitted against each other—peace...