Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations

Abstract

One hundred years after W. E. B. Du Bois identified America's greatest challenge as "the problem of the colorline," 1 that problem appears as intransigent as ever. Although many members of our society wish it away or deny its continued relevance, racial inequality and antagonism are alive and well, as attested most recently by the controversy over African American voter access in Florida in the 2000 presidential election and by the recent lawsuits seeking reparations for slaves' descendents. 2 Accusations of white racism or black "reverse racism" fly freely in the Land of the Free, and affirmative action for equal opportunity generates heated debates in this nation dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal." As sociologist Orlando Patterson puts it, discussions about race in the United States today resemble a "dialogue of the deaf." 3 Tragically, it appears that the present generation is destined to pass on the problem of race to still another generation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.