Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation

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.

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., 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.

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. He has collaborated with Charles J. Ogletree on numerous works for NYU Press, including Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation: Beyond Law and Rights, Punishment in Popular Culture, When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice, The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States, and From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. He is also the co-editor of Guns in Law, Criminals and Enemies, Law’s Mistakes, Reimagining “To Kill a Mockingbird”: Family,. Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law, and many others.