Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation: Beyond Law and Rights
Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Austin Sarat (eds.)°°°
From Baltimore & Ferguson to Flint & Charleston, the dream of a post-racial era in America has run up against the continuing reality of racial antagonism.
Current debates about affirmative action, multiculturalism, & racial hate speech reveal persistent uncertainty & ambivalence about the place & meaning of race – & especially the black/white divide – in American culture. They also suggest that the work of racial reconciliation remains incomplete.
Racial Reconciliation & the Healing of a Nation seeks to assess where we are in that work, examining sources of continuing racial antagonism among blacks & whites. It also highlights strategies that promise to promote racial reconciliation in the future.
Rather than revisit arguments about the importance of integration, assimilation, & reparations, the contributors explore previously unconsidered perspectives on reconciliation between blacks & whites. Chapters connect identity politics, the rhetoric of race & difference, the work of institutions & actors in those institutions, & structural inequities in the lives of blacks & whites to our thinking about tolerance & respect.
Going beyond an assessment of the capacity of law to facilitate racial reconciliation, Racial Reconciliation & the Healing of a Nation challenges readers to examine social, political, cultural, & psychological issues that fuel racial antagonism, as well as the factors that might facilitate racial reconciliation.