Hope For Reconciliation Research Articles

The Hope of Reconciliation: Continuing the Conversation

The Hope of Reconciliation:Continuing the Conversation John B. Hatch (bio) When I wrote "Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations," I hoped it would help spark a conversation about reconciliation among rhetoricians, so I was very gratified when it appeared as a forum piece in this journal. The gratification multiplied with the publication of responses from three eminent scholars of the rhetoric of race relations and reconciliation. I consider the affirmations and critiques offered by Kirt H. Wilson, Erik Doxtader, and Mark Lawrence McPhail essential complements and clarifications to my initial sketching of the rhetorical nature and value of reconciliation. My response to them will be twofold. On a theoretical level, I will suggest how the approach I proposed and the perspectives my respondents presented complement one another within reconciliation as a coherent tragicomic praxis; I will also respond to specific critiques of the perspective I offered and further flesh out that perspective. Parallel to this theoretical response, I will consider several proposed and actual examples of racial reconciliation's practice, including Roy L. Brooks's Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations. I will conclude by considering reconciliation's hope in the United States. Interest-Convergence in Reconciliation: Moral, Social Psychological, and Material Kirt Wilson's reading of my essay suggests that I believe social psychology holds the key to solving the problem of race. While sympathetic with my project, Wilson ultimately disagrees with my choice of critical lever, believing that [End Page 259] "a social psychological approach is not the best foundation for a theoretical model or pragmatic methodology that addresses the problem" of racism in America. 1 In fact, he is "not convinced that reconciliation is the best direction for future U.S. race relations." For Wilson, the roots of racism lie neither in cognition nor emotion about racial identity, but rather in material interests that motivate one group to maintain its advantage over another. Thus, the key to overturning systems of white privilege is rhetorically constructing inter-racial interests (interest-convergence), convincing whites in particular that their interests are better served by dismantling systems of racial privilege than by allowing the status quo to continue. Wilson grounds this conclusion in Derrick A. Bell's Critical Race Theory, which holds "that civil rights progress transpires only in moments of interest-convergence and that every significant development in U.S. civil rights history has benefited white communities at least as much, if not more, than black communities." 2 Contra McPhail, Wilson believes that transforming complicitous racial discourse into coherent interracial dialogue will not necessarily reduce racism, since the latter is a systemic phenomenon in economic relations. Wilson supports this argument with the case of South Africa, where the rhetoric of reconciliation did not substantially reduce material inequality between whites and blacks and has actually served the economic interests of the white establishment. Drawing on Philippe-Joseph Salazar's analysis of South African reconciliation, he cites the fact that two "pillars" of the apartheid regime—the Absa banking consortium and the Sanlam insurance group—were prominent producers of reconciliation rhetoric while continuing to guard their own (white) interests. 3 Wilson goes so far as to say that "both companies were participating in the kind of 'coherent' rhetoric for which Hatch calls." 4 I believe this statement reveals a partial misunderstanding of my proposal for coherent reconciliation. In the introduction to my essay, I emphasized that coherent reconciliation is not "a rhetorical sleight of hand in which an appearance of unity is suspended from thin air by empty words of apology and forgiveness, while history is conjured away and the unfinished business of justice is abandoned to the rushing currents of economic expedience." 5 Insofar as the rhetoric of unity and reconciliation produced by two economic powerhouses in South Africa was primarily a matter of image management and economic expedience rather than structural reform, it would hardly be called "coherent" in my analysis. It is true that I emphasized a social psychological corrective to McPhail's theory and did not stress the structural dimensions of racism. Rather, I took the latter to be a given, and saw that reconciliation offered...

The politics of e-access and e-funding in the library environment

Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community has been digitised and can be accessed in full on this website. All content is freely available on an open-access basis. Serials was published between 1988 and 2011. In 2012, the journal was retitled and is now published as Insights: the UKSG journal.

I Am My Brother's (and Sister's) Keeper: Jewish Values and the Counseling Process

The author writes a rejoinder to M. S. Kiselica's (2003) article “Anti‐Semitism and Insensitivity Toward Jews by the Counseling Profession: A Gentile's View on the Problem and His Hope for Reconciliation—A Response to Weinrach (2002),” which is part of a dialogue in the fall 2003 Journal of Counseling & Development on anti‐Semitism in the counseling profession. M. S. Kiselica supports the notion that Jewish concerns are inextricable from multicultural counseling. The author has asserted that there has been a critical mass of anti‐Semitic behavior within the counseling profession, including the American Counseling Association, for more than 3 decades. The author's perspective may be viewed as an application of the Torah's dictum “I am my brother's [and sister's] keeper.” The author also argues that while culture may influence behavior, it does not determine it exclusively.

Pardoning Puritanism: Community, Character, and Forgiveness in the Work of Richard Baxter

The English Puritan Richard Baxter (1615–1691) developed an account of forgiveness that resonates with twentieth‐century virtue ethics. He understood forgiveness as one component of a larger disposition of character developed in community as human beings recognize themselves as sinful creatures engaged in complex relationships of dependency and responsibility, with both God and one another. In the midst of these relationships, persons experience divine and human forgiveness and discover opportunities to practice forgiveness in return. Baxter thus negotiated a distinctive relationship between Christian hope for reconciliation and more stereotypical Puritan emphases on punishment, civil order, and justice. At the same time that recent moral reflection allows us to raise questions about some features of Baxter's argument (such as his treatment of anger), his work provides important resources for correlating dispositions with concrete obligations, establishing a place for forgiveness in the public realm, and counterbalancing the modern emphasis on individual rights.

Conflict resolution in Africa

In an attempt to draw lessons from African experience with conflict resolution, this paper examines three disputes: the Western Sahara conflict between Morocco and the Polisario, the thirty-year armed strife between North and South Sudan and the emergence of the breakaway Somaliland following the overthrow of Siad Barre. The Western Sahara dispute, under consideration by the United Nations since 1965, would have long been settled had it not been for late King Hassan's intransigence, US support of his unjust claim to sovereignty of the former Spanish colony and the reluctance of African leaders to incur his displeasure. The Southern Sudan was the victim of well-nigh-complete neglect under the British colonial administration and, thanks to the prejudice and shortsightedness of Northern politicians, it has faired even worse after independence. Memories of past slavery have been rankled by present injustice and marginalisation. Moreover, any hope for reconciliation has been shattered by the determination of the ruling Islamic fundamentalist regime of Khartoum to transform the Sudan into an out-and-out Islamic state. The former British protectorate of Somaliland, driven by the irredentism then prevailing among the Somali-speaking people scattered in different parts of East Africa, precipitated, a week after independence, into union with the former Italian-administered trust territory to form the Republic of Somalia on 26 June 1965. Ten years after independence, however, Siad Barre seized power by coup d'et ushering two decades of misrule characterised by a sinister mix of clanism, nepotism and an ignorant understanding of scientific socialism. Resentment which at first took the form of peaceful, political opposition in the north gradually developed into a full-fledged countrywide civil war. When Siad Barre was overthrown, anarchy ensued in Mogadiscio. By contrast, the Somalilanders succeeded, through a series of traditionally styled conferences, in resolving tribal conflicts, disbanding tribal militias and establishing a primordial but working system of government. But the OAU, the Arab League and the rest of the international community rewarded them by refusing to recognise Somaliland's claim to separate statehood.

"You Must Remember This": Autobiography as Social Critique

Critics often lament a decline in historical literacy and worry about how little Americans know about the past. And yet, in the United States and throughout the world, historical memory has become both a cultural obsession and a powerful political weapon. The people of South Africa, to take just one example, have staked their hopes for reconciliation on the conviction that memories of atrocities must not be erased; the victims' testimony must be heard and acknowledged, and the perpetrators must admit what they have done. At the same time, in Rwanda, in the former Yugoslavia, in Ireland, and elsewhere around the globe, narratives of supposedly ancient grievances and hostilities can justify brutality, knitting people together in imagined communities that can exclude and kill, with no sense of guilt. 1

A 1-year follow-up study of children's divorce adjustment, custodial mothers' divorce adjustment, and postdivorce parenting

This study examined stability of and change in divorce adjustment in a sample of 20 white custodial mothers and their children (8 boys, 12 girls; mean age = 10.45 years) who were examined an average of 12.85 months after separation and again one year later. Pearson correlations generally revealed moderate stability in children's adjustment, mothers' adjustment, and parenting dimensions. Significant changes over the one-year period were found only with respect to children's beliefs about the divorce: problematic beliefs regarding peer ridicule and avoidance, fear of abandonment, and self-blame decreased over the 1-year period. Children's adjustment at Time 2 was related to the following variables assessed at Time 1: low rhythmic and low reactive child temperaments; children's mature understanding of conflict resolution; high social support for children and for mothers; low maternal stress; high maternal adjustment; cooperative parenting; high paternal involvement; and frequent visitation by and phone contact from the fathers. Children with few problematic beliefs at Time 2 regarding fear of abandonment and hope of reconciliation had mothers who functioned poorly at Time 1. Although the small sample size necessitates that the findings be viewed with caution, they support the view that children's divorce adjustment is related to children's own competencies, intrafamilial processes, and extrafamilial conditions.

« Pissing in the Gale of History ». Contemporary Protestant Culture and the « Ancient Curse »

Working within a Gramscian problematic this article analyses the contemporary issue of identity among Northern Ireland's Protestants as it manifests itself in two plays : Ron Hutchinson's Rat in the Skull, and This Is It ! by Andie Tyrie and Sam Duddy of the UDA, with Michael Hall. In particular, the authors consider the ways in which these cultural artifacts address the political and psychological consequences of the breakdown of the myth of siege which has, historically, informed and maintained Protestant/Unionist identity against the Catholic/Nationalist « Other ». The article concludes by demonstrating that in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic a significant group of intellectuals are attempting to break with divisive histories and demonstrate that « cosmopolitan », « socialist » histories, too long denied, hold out the best hope of reconciliation and unity.

Nothing Comes of All: Lear-Dying

ITTERNESS IS to the taste and thus not to be disputed. When say, then, that King Lear leaves a bitter taste-the taste of mortality-I mean to suggest a premise around which the rest of this discussion will locate itself. That premise, although unarguable, is hardly arbitrary. There has been too much talk, in the centuries of writing about Shakespeare, of the savagery of King Lear, of its excessive force, for us to mistake that response only for impression or mere sentiment. No other of Shakespeare's tragedies-and none of the classical non-Shakespearean tragedies-tantalizes the viewer with the prospect, after much suffering and the recognition to which that suffering leads, of pain sealed off, cauterized, only to have him find even in the short time that remains (as with Cordelia's death and then Lear's) that this is not to be, that what he is offered at a point where he hopes for reconciliation or even a respite is the impatience of death itself. In the old Leir from which Shakespeare drew, and in Tate's revision which improved on Shakespeare in the judgment of audiences for the century and a half after 1681, Cordelia survives; when the King dies (or in Tate, lives on), he does so as kings themselves would choose to, in honored old age. If a reader fortified with Samuel Johnson's uncommon measure of sensibility and assurance can write that I was many years ago shocked by Cordelia's death, that know not whether ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till undertook to revise them as an editor, we are bound ourselves to question that event and the others which lead to it. How could Shakespeare have mistaken this excess? But we may be confident, of course, that he did not; that what for us comes to be distinctive about King Lear was first and consciously distinguished by him. And the reactions described verge, then, with a sharper edge than is usual on a standard question that might be asked of any complex literary structure: Why? Why-within the structure

The psychiatrist: in the mainstream or on the banks of medicine?

The author discusses psychiatry's historical estrangement from general medicine, beginning with its isolation in mental hospitals, aggravated by a deterioration in medical school teaching of clinical psychiatry and by limited psychiatric training programs, and further alienated by much of psychosomatic theory and practice. He sees hope for reconciliation, however, in the recent progress of psychopharmacology and liaison psychiatry within the general hospital.

Two Schools

This is a case study of a community development project in a village in the Dominican Republic. The community development worker was coopted by a group which attempted to have a school building constructed on its side of the village, an attempt which failed when an opposing group succeeded in having the school built on its side. As a result, the worker unwittingly helped precipitate a confrontation between the two groups with seemingly little hope of reconciliation or cooperation in the future.