Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation: Beyond Law and Rights

by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. (Editor), Austin Sarat (Editor)

Overview

The work at hand for bridging the racial divide in the United States

From Baltimore and Ferguson to Flint and 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, and racial hate speech reveal persistent uncertainty and ambivalence about the place and meaning of race – and especially the black/white divide – in American culture. They also suggest that the work of racial reconciliation remains incomplete.

Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation seeks to assess where we are in that work, examining sources of continuing racial antagonism among blacks and whites. It also highlights strategies that promise to promote racial reconciliation in the future.

Rather than revisit arguments about the importance of integration, assimilation, and reparations, the contributors explore previously unconsidered perspectives on reconciliation between blacks and whites. Chapters connect identity politics, the rhetoric of race and difference, the work of institutions and actors in those institutions, and structural inequities in the lives of blacks and whites to our thinking about tolerance and respect.

Going beyond an assessment of the capacity of law to facilitate racial reconciliation, Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation challenges readers to examine social, political, cultural, and psychological issues that fuel racial antagonism, as well as the factors that might facilitate racial reconciliation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479803705
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	10/24/2017
Series:	The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	452 KB

About the Author

Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. (Editor)
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. He is the author of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (WW Norton and Company, 2004) and Co-Author of From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America.

Austin Sarat (Editor)
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has written or edited dozens of books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution, Law's Infamy: Understanding the Canon of Bad Law, and Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities and Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era, which won the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Book Award.


Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He has also served as Mellon Professor of the Humanities for the Bard Prison Initiative. He has authored or edited more than one hundred books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Human Execution.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Bridging the Black-White Divide Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. Austin Sarat 1

1 Racial Fakery and the Next Postracial: Reconciliation in the Age of Dolezal Matthew Pratt Guterl 25

2 Race and Science: Preconciliation as Reconciliation Osagie K. Obasogie 49

3 From Perceiving Injustice to Achieving Racial Justice: Interrogating the Impact of Racial Brokers on Racial Antagonism and Racial Reconciliation Carla Shedd 62

4 Weaponized Empathy: Emotion and the Limits of Racial Reconciliation in Policing Naomi Murakawa 89

5 Black Deaths Matter, Too: Doing Racial Reconciliation after the Massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina Valerie C. Cooper 113

6 The "Post-national" Racial State, Domestication, and Multiscalar Organizing in the New Millennium Kirstie A. Dorr 150

About the Editors 183

About the Contributors 185

Index 187

Editorial Reviews

"For critical readers wondering whether racial reconciliation is possible in the United States, whether many in the country are committed to curing the nations racial divisions, and what strategies might move the nation towards healing, Ogletree and Sarats new volume presents an extraordinary collection of modern essayists, looking back at de Tocqueville and Myrdal and forward to myriad lingering barriers to equal citizenship in American life. This compelling book lays bare the many challenges to and opportunities for reconciliation in this age of systemic racial disadvantage."

Bryan K. Fair

"At a time when we sorely need it, this book challenges us not only to confront the painful state of race relations in this country but also to do the difficult work necessary to heal the deep wounds caused by our divisions. This collection of essays, written by a dynamic group of preeminent scholars, tackles some of the toughest social problems of our day, from discrimination and mistreatment of black and brown youth in public schools and in the criminal justice system to seemingly impenetrable segregation in the pews of churches across the country on Sunday morning."

Montré D. Carodine

"At a time when we sorely need it, this book challenges us not only to confront the painful state of race relations in this country but also to do the difficult work necessary to heal the deep wounds caused by our divisions. This collection of essays, written by a dynamic group of preeminent scholars, tackles some of the toughest social problems of our day, from discrimination and mistreatment of black and brown youth in public schools and in the criminal justice system to seemingly impenetrable segregation in the pews of churches across the country on Sunday morning."

Montré D. Carodine

"At a time when we sorely need it, this book challenges us not only to confront the painful state of race relations in this country but also to do the difficult work necessary to heal the deep wounds caused by our divisions. This collection of essays, written by a dynamic group of preeminent scholars, tackles some of the toughest social problems of our day, from discrimination and mistreatment of black and brown youth in public schools and in the criminal justice system to seemingly impenetrable segregation in the pews of churches across the country on Sunday morning."-Montré D. Carodine,Professor of Law, The University of Alabama School of Law

"For critical readers wondering whether racial reconciliation is possible in the United States, whether many in the country are committed to curing the nation’s racial divisions, and what strategies might move the nation towards healing, Ogletree and Sarat’s new volume presents an extraordinary collection of modern essayists, looking back at de Tocqueville and Myrdal and forward to myriad lingering barriers to equal citizenship in American life. This compelling book lays bare the many challenges to and opportunities for reconciliation in this age of systemic racial disadvantage." -Bryan K. Fair,author of Notes of a Racial Caste Baby

From the Publisher