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Mark Lawrence McPhail

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 391-405
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/rap.2005.0013

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rap/summary/v007/7.3mcphail.html

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391

A QUESTION OF CHARACTER: RE(-)SIGNING THE RACIAL CONTRACT

MARK LAWRENCE MCPHAIL
Is white America really sorry for her crimes against the black people? Does white
America have the capacity to repentand to atone? Doe
s the capacity to repent, to
atone, exist in a majority, in one half, in even one-third of
American white society?
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Ach, Im not fuckin sorry for what I did. LookI foughtfor my country, I believed in
what I did, and I did a good job. They were my enemy at the time. . . . I did my job
well. And Id do it again if the circumstances called for it. No, man, Im not really
fuckin sorry for what I did.
Captain Jacques Hechter

The two epigraphs with which I begin this essay epitomize the stasis at the heart of
any discussion of racial reconciliation: the question of credibility. The first comes
from the American social activist Malcolm X.1 The second comes from Captain
Jacques Hechter, a former member of South Africas apartheid security
police.2
Taken together, they reveal the double-edged character of rhetorics third blade:
ethos. The question of character as it emerges in language is fundamentally at
stake in any discussion of race,3 and it informs my response to John Hatchs
thoughtful and well-argued essay on enlarging rhetorical coherence through reconciliation.4 Hatch suggests that by forging a rhetoric of coherent reconciliation, we
might contribute to a better public discourse about race in the United States. He
argues that by further theorizing reconciliation as a tragicomically coherent
rhetoric, rhetoricians could help prepare the way for principled practices and constructive critiques of racial reconciliation in the United States.5 I wish to pursue
this suggestion by examining the rhetoric of racial reconciliation in the enlarged
space opened by Malcolm Xs question and Jacques Hechters answer: the
space within which apologies are deemed sincere or simply expedient, within
which cred- ibility and character are paramount.
This space is circumscribed by the center/margin relationship that is defined by
what Charles M. Mills describes as The Racial Contract. Unlike the social
contract idealized in Western philosophy and politics, the Racial Contract reveals
the ideo- logical presuppositions and material conditions that have constrained
race relations for the past five hundred years. During that time, black rhetors have
sought persis- tently to re-sign the Racial Contract, and have contributed to the
crafting in real
Mark Lawrence McPhail is Professor of Communication in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at
Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

FORUM

terms of the ideals of the social contract. White rhetors, in contrast, have
largely resisted this re-signing, and have instead embraced and reshaped the Racial
Contract in ways more subtle and insidious. Consequently, freedom, equality, and
responsi- bility have been conceptualized and actualized in radically different ways
by peoples of African and European descent: the former see these in terms of the
consequences and material conditions of the Racial Contract, while the latter define
these in terms of abstractions and intentions of the social contract. Closing the gap
between the two is a prerequisite for coherent reconciliation, and this can only be
accomplished by a collective act of white atonement: a resigning of the Racial
Contract. 6
Whether or not this re-signing is possible is the question that led me to revisit
the rhetoric of racism and that now confronts John Hatch. Will white people ever
be sorry? Implicitly, Hatch would answer this question in the affirmative. He
presents a compelling and provocative argument for theorizing reconciliation as a
tragicom- ically grounded discourse, one that appeals as strongly to emotion as
to reason. I sympathize with his commitment to pursuing the generative and
transformative potential of discourse, but I remain skeptical about the possibility
of genuine racial reconciliation in either South Africa or the United States. South
Africas struggle for reconciliation, as Hechters comments reveal, remains caught
up in questions of credibility and character. Similar questions are raised by the
white racial recovery rhetorics that dominate discussions of reconciliation and
reparations in the United States.7 In both contexts, while significant numbers of
black people have shown a marked willingness to engage in the symbolic and
social discourses and behaviors that facilitate reconciliation, whites have been
overwhelmingly unwilling to do the same, and have even been openly
contemptuous of such efforts.
These differences might best be explained by Kirt H. Wilsons observation that
it is the structure of our collective memory and public discourse that makes
racism a persistent problem.8 Wilsons insightful study points to the role of
credibility in conversations about race in the United States and to the justified
skepticism that black people bring to those conversations: People of color are
learned observers when it comes to Americas racial policies, and, despite some
exceptions, the major- ity believe that their equality has been undermined by
deep prejudices that even well-meaning whites fail to appreciate.9 His analysis
offers a starting point for con- sidering the importance of ethos in discussions
about race and reconciliation, and the difficulties that constrain these discussions:
The races have difficulty commu- nicating largely because we are collectively
ignorant of the cultural assumptions that guide and inform the deliberative
practice of the other race.10 Id like to extend this analysis in a direction that
uncovers another aspect of our collective ignorance, one that calls the moral ethos
of the Wests social contract into question.
Here I will explore reconciliation not as an idealized outcome of discourse but
as a concrete discursive practice, not as a prescribed possibility but as a described
phe- nomenon. As such, I will ground my discussion of reconciliation in the
theory of

the Racial Contract. Mills describes the Racial Contract as an ideological predisposition that informs the beliefs that people of European descent have developed
about themselves and others, and the behaviors in which they have engaged as a
result of those beliefs. Unlike the idealized social contract that accounts for
racism either as abstraction or anomaly, the Racial Contract assumes that
racism is the norm and that people think of themselves as raced rather than
abstract citizens, which any objective history will in fact show.11 To the extent
that reconciliation begins with the recognition of historical responsibility, any
attempt to theorize a rhetorical strategy capable of achieving it must account for
the ways in which talk of reconciliation can be characterized as credible. Reading
the rhetoric of reconcil- iation against the theory of the Racial Contract can, I
believe, bring us closer to that space described by Wilson where we can begin to
grapple with the divergent ratio- nalities that hinder open and honest
discussion,12 and begin the difficult task of racial healing and atonement.
I will begin by revisiting South Africas rhetoric of reconciliation to suggest that
it represents a concrete attempt to re-sign the complicity of the Racial Contract
into a coherent social contract. I will argue first that South Africas rhetoric of
reconcil- iation, motivated by forgiveness, apology, and responsibility, is a
markedly black rhetoric, which like black rhetoric in the United States has been
unsuccessful in per- suading whites to collectively apologize for their historical
treatment of people of African descent. This, I maintain, is not so much
determined by the transformative potential of rhetoric, but by the ethos of the
Racial Contract. Here I draw upon James S. Baumlins reading of Burkes
description of ethos as an implicitly violent practice of self-identification by
means of scapegoating,13 to illustrate the pervasive social and psychological
impediments to racial reconciliation sustained by the Racial Contract.
Accordingly, I will argue that the failure of Representative Tony Halls proposed
congressional apology for slavery is not, as Hatch suggests, because it lacks the
necessary rhetorical grounding,14 but because of an unwillingness among
white Americans to resign the Racial Contract.
Thus, as I argue in the conclusion of The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited, I remain
convinced that it will take more than rhetoric to reconcile the long and tragic history of white supremacy and racism. Ultimately, it will require a resigning of the
Racial Contract by whites that complements the black resigning of it. Since much
of my earlier work has focused on how this resignation can be accomplished by
African Americans, in this essay I will focus on European Americans, arguing
that it will require acts of atonement by whites to move the rhetoric of racism
through complicity and toward coherence. This, I believe, is the lesson revealed
by South Africas transition from apartheid to democracy, and concealed by the
racial recov- ery projects that have undermined equality and justice in postcivil
rights America. In light of a collective history marked by black rhetorical efforts
to facilitate racial reconciliation and the refusal and rejection of those efforts, I
maintain that racial

healing and reconciliation are unlikely without a credible commitment on the part
of whites that begins with sincere atonement and culminates in substantive
repara- tions. This would amount to repudiation, dismantling, and resigning of
the Racial Contract.

RE-SIGNING THE RACIAL CONTRACT: THE RHETORIC

OF SOUTH AFRICAN RECONCILIATION
South Africas transition from apartheid to democracy, while largely the result of
massive internal resistance and unanimous international approval, including economic sanctions,15 was also achieved through the willingness of a black majority to
enact in practice the abstract principles of democracy, equality, and justice. The
uniqueness of the South African situation is that it not only allowed for black participation in the political process,16 but gave blacks control over how that process
would be conceived and implemented. It is precisely because black leaders and
cit- izens were instrumental in engineering the transition from apartheid to
democracy that the possibility of reconciliation emerged in South Africa. From
an explicitly anti-racist constitution to an institutional commitment to
restorative justice, the architects of reconciliation, Archbishop Desmond Tutu
and Nelson Mandela, cre- ated the foundations for a new political ecology of
rhetoric, borne by a democracy built on a sanguine belief in human rights in the
fullest extent of the expression.17
The credibility of South Africas reconciliation was very much connected to
the characters of these two men, whose actions matched their words and who
con- structed a coherent rhetoric that connected principles with practices.
As I noted in The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited, one might see the South African
rhetoric of reconciliation as a rhetoric of coherence. Both attempt to achieve the
same ends: the conscious understanding and integration of difference in order to
transform division.18 The transformation envisioned by South Africas rhetoric of
reconciliation was informed by the African cultural beliefs and practices like
Ubuntu and Umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye bantu.19 Thus, while there were many
voices involved in the planning and deliberations that resulted in the transition
from apartheid to democracy, South Africas rhetoric of reconciliation was largely a
black rhetoric: it was the spiritually inspired militancy of a Tutu and the integrative
Afrocentricity of a Mandela that formed the substance of a reconstitutive black
rhetoric, a coherent rhetoric of reconciliation.20 To understand the success of South
Africas rhetoric of reconciliation, as well as its failures, we must examine it within
the context of the Racial Contract.
As Vincent Crapanzano long ago observed, apartheid is an extreme case of the
Western predisposition to categorize everything in essentialist terms.21
Apartheid, with its categorizing of racial difference in separate and unequal terms,
represents the institutional embodiment of the Racial Contract. As Mills explains,
the Racial

Contract establishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial juridical system,
where the status of whites and non-whites is clearly demarcated, whether by
custom or law.22 Apartheid enacts in policy and practice the ideological and
epistemological presuppositions of the Racial Contract:
A partitioned social ontology is therefore created, a universe divided between
persons and racial subpersons, Untermenschen, who may variously be black, red,
brown, yel- lowslaves, aborigines, colonial populationsbut who are collectively
appropriately known as subject races. And these subpersonsniggers, injuns,
chinks, wogs, greasers, blackfellows, kaffirs, coolies, abos, dinks, googoos, gooks
are biologically destined never to penetrate the normative rights ceiling established
for them below white persons.23

Black South African reconciliation initiated the re-signing of this contract. As

Philippe-Joseph Salazar suggests, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission should be seen as a demonstration of the nature of the new social
contract.24 The development of a constitution explicitly committed to the dismantling of racism, and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, both
established a context where reconciliation became not only possible, but probable.
Yet, as Salazar point outs, there are also tensions between the constitution and
the work of the commission that could undermine one of the basic tenets of reconciliation: the importance of historical memory. As democratic subjects, the new
South African citizens have entered into a contract that precludes them from
think- ing from the standpoint of the TRC, writes Salazar. The irony of the TRC
process is that nation-building requires a measure of amnesia. New citizens
engaged in democratic deliberation cannot afford to continue thinking of
themselves as vic- tims or perpetrators.25 This measure of amnesia suggests that
South African rec- onciliation may have achieved a re-signing of the racial
contract, but not a resigning. The rhetoric of reconciliation, as embodied in the
constitution and the TRC, attempts to substitute a new social contract for the old
Racial Contract, but as with all credible contracts it must be mutually
understood and accepted by the publics it defines and disciplines. But as one
observer of the transition from apartheid to democracy observes: If
reconciliation depends upon mutual under- standings, we should not be
optimistic.26 Such sentiments reflect an understand- ing and awareness of the
ongoing commitment of many South African whites to the old Racial Contract.
Reading South Africas rhetoric of reconciliation through this understanding
and awareness sheds light on the psychological and physical spaces closed by the
old Racial Contract. And despite the willingness of black leaders and citizens to
forgive and even forget the racial injustices of apartheid, there remains a strong
commit- ment to an ideology of innocence among white South Africans.
Blacks have

demonstrated an amazing grace and capacity to embrace former enemies,

following the lead of their president explains Lyn Graybill, while whites for the
most part have remained aloof and unresponsive, surprised and grateful perhaps
by the lack of bitterness and acts of vengeance toward them by blacks, but still
unwilling to be transformed by the grace offered to them in such great
measure.27 Most white South Africans, following the leads of F. W. de Klerk and
P. W. Botha, feel no need to apologize for apartheid.28 And in the absence of an
apology, claims of a commit- ment to reconciliation lack credibility. As Eric
Yamamoto observes, with the lead- erships resistance to large-scale white
repentance . . . the prospects for genuine (as distinguished from media soundbite) black and white reconciliation appear dim.29 The sharp contrast
between the willingness to forgive and the refusal to apologize reveals the ways
in which the Racial Contract continues to undermine the possibility of coherent
reconciliation.
It is not my intention to reduce the complexities of race to black and white:
obvi- ously, there are many blacks who refused to apologize just as there are many
whites who atoned for their participation in apartheid.30 I do wish, however, to
suggest that the political and psychological realities of the Racial Contract, if
ignored, will make it extremely difficult to move whites and blacks from denial
and complicity to the kind of dialogic cooperation needed for achieving racial
justice and har- mony.31 The Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an
inverted epistemol- ogy, an epistemology of ignorance, explain Mills,
producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand
the world they themselves have made.32 Without a resigning of the Racial
Contract, the move through complicity to coherence may not be possible. And
there is little credible evidence to suggest that such a move is likely for people of
European descent any time in the near future. In South Africa, as well as in the
United States, the projection and protection of white racial privilege and power
continue to be exercised and embraced, and in both cases have become much more
subtle and insidious.

RESISTING RECONCILIATION: REWRITING

THE

RACIAL CONTRACT

The resistance to racial reconciliation among whites is, I continue to believe, a

prob- lem of pathology, both social and psychological. It is unlikely that it
can be addressed adequately, as Hatch suggests, through an enlarging of
coherence from the comic to the tragicomic. This move, though certainly a step
in the right direc- tion, fails to account for the ethos of the Racial Contract.
Baumlins reading of Burkes extension of ethos beyond its Aristotelian origins
moves the discussion of racial reconciliation beyond the scope of a tragicomic
conceptualization of coher- ence and toward a rhetorical account of the
diffidence of racism. According to Baumlin, Burke situates his theory of rhetoric
within a social psychology of scape- goating wherein communal identity is
strengthened by the presence and threat,

whether real or imaginary, of an ethnic, racial, or religious other, whose

cultural image has been demonized and against whom the communitys
cooperative efforts and resources can be directed.33 The underlying
consciousness that sustains this ethos, the assumption of negative difference,
establishes the preconditions for the violations of the social contract that
characterize the modern history of European colonization and domination of the
non-white people of the planet.
Those violations, prescribed by the Racial Contract, are accommodated in consciousness through denial and rationalization. As Mills explains: One could say
then, as a general rule, that white misunderstandings, misrepresentation, evasion,
and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental
phe- nomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy
psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement.34 The
discourses of discov- ery, civilization, progress, and advance provide whites with a
history of positive self- representation35 that resists the encroachments and
advances of those oppositional discourses that call into question white privilege
and power, that characterize racial histories in terms of their observed symbolic
and material consequences instead of their purported principles and ideals.
Rhetoric may not be able to fill the gap between the real and ideal that
sustains the Racial Contract, because the contract itself survives by virtue of its
unwillingness to be named. It is the normativity of whiteness as a system of
unearned privilege, its unspokenness, that precludes the possibility of genuine
reconciliation, and it is uncertain that any form of rhetoricpersuasive or
dialogic, rational or emotional, coherent or tragicomic can create the
conditions necessary for the signatories of the racial contract to repu- diate it.36
This is not to say that rhetoric can have no role in this process. Discourse will
undoubtedly be instrumental in determining the right mix of ingredients to make
[reconciliation] effective for racial healing in the United States,37 but only to the
extent that it accounts for the pervasiveness of the Racial Contract. Millss concluding thoughts, directed at moral and political philosophers, are also instructive for
rhetorical scholars:
Naming this reality brings it into the necessary theoretical focus for these issues to be
honestly addressed. Those who pretend not to see them, who claim not to recognize
the pictures I have sketched, are only continuing the epistemology of ignorance
required by the original Racial Contract. As long as this studied ignorance persists,
the Racial Contract will only be rewritten, rather than being torn up altogether, and
jus- tice will continue to be restricted to just us.38

Since genuine reconciliation requires taking responsibility for history, it is

inconceivable that coherent reconciliation can be achieved without widespread
white acknowledgement and repudiation of the Racial Contract. Believing that this

is possible demands, in light of the racial realities of the past five hundred years, a
major leap of faith, the same leap of faith that has historically sustained African
American rhetorical practices and theories.
The naming of the Racial Contract has been a persistent rhetorical strategy used
by black speakers to question the credibility of the social contract. From
Frederick Douglasss claim that the problem of race in America is, at its root, a
question of whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty
enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own
Constitution,39 to Martin Luther Kings call for America to Be true to what you
said on paper,40 black rhetors have consistently called for coherence between
the nations constitution and its social contracts. Black rhetoric has always shown
a commitment to creating, and re- creating, self, other, and society, to seeking
dialogue, and to striving toward coher- ence. But too often the responses of
whites have been marked by a certain kind of blindness, a dialogic deafness, a
discursive dumbness: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The Racial Contract
is sustained through this rewriting of the history of race. Creating the right
mix for a rhetoric of coherent reconciliation will require not a rewriting of race
history, but an acknowledgement of its erasure.
In the case of both South Africa and the United States, it will require coming to
grips with the past in order to construct a new vision for the future. Deborah F.
Atwater and Sandra L. Herndon point to the challenges that we face: What is the
collectively held history of South Africa and the United States? Is it unthinkable to
expect to live in a world without racism? A world before and after Jim Crow and
apartheid?41 Atwater and Herndon suggest that, at the center of both rhetorical situations, the question of ethos continues to be raised: Both countries are experiencing the complicated issues of how one speaks about a cultural history and, even
more importantly, who will listen.42 If racial reconciliation is to become a
reality, we all must be able to speak candidly, and we all must be willing to
listen. Otherwise, conversations and debates about responsibility, reparations, and
racial healing will remain mired in a dangerous dialectic . . . between self and
other, the self needing the other in order to fashion and defend its own selfimage.43 This hegemonic dialectic, which has defined our racial rhetorics and
histories for far too long, can only be transformed through that self-reflexive
awareness of complicity that cultivates an understanding of implicature,44 and
culminates in atonement.
Aaron David Gresson IIIs powerful exploration of the rhetorics of racial pain,
recovery, and healing reveals the centrality of atonement for reconciliation, as
well as the powerful psychological impulses at work that
resist it.
Commenting on Representative Tony Halls proposed apology for slavery and
the anti-reparations rhetoric of David Horowitz, Gresson implicitly points to the
need for an acknowl- edgement of the Racial Contract. For a healing discourse to
have a chance of work- ing in the American dreamscape, it ultimately comes back
to power and how one negotiates with specific individuals who comply with
powers hegemonic hold, he

explains.45 For Gresson, white racial recovery narratives that deny the existence
of the Racial Contract while simultaneously affirming the basic principles of the
social contract undermine the possibility of atonement and coherent
reconciliation:
I have done nothing to anybodythe past is not upon my head. This pervasive and
passionate sentiment is uttered from the depths of the soul. From the mouths of those
identified as heirs of the powerful and dominant, these words issue from persons
determined to be fair, forthright, and productive citizens. Still I am troubled by them.
My concern is that these utterances will delay the transformative shifts we need if
soci- ety is truly to become more democratic and righteous.46

I too am troubled by the absence of empathy and implicature such statements convey. With Gresson and Hatch, I agree that a more intimate emotional connection
between black and white Americans will go a long way toward creating a context
for racial healing.47 I also believe that an understanding of the Racial Contract is
nec- essary if that intimacy is to create the social and psychological conditions
necessary for the commitment to forgiveness and atonement, and for the
articulation of a credible and coherent discourse of racial reconciliation.

RESIGNING

THE

RACIAL CONTRACT: SOME PROLEGOMENA

FOR RECONCILIATION

Apartheid is not over in South Africa, writes Erik Doxtader in his important
exploration of the rhetorical dimensions of South Africas transition to democracy.48 While hopeful about the prospects for racial reconciliation after apartheid,
he nonetheless recognizes the challenges and uncertainties that remain. If it did
shape the South African transition, it is not clear how reconciliation has addressed
or engaged the material aftermath of apartheid. It can be argued credibly that the
politics of reconciliation created black rule but preserved white power.49
Doxtaders analysis, like Hechters apology, should serve as a reminder that
the relinquishing of racial privilege is not simply a matter of change at the social
level, but at the psychological level as well. Hechter made these comments
shortly after appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In his
public prepared statement he remarked, I am sorry about the loss of lives. I hope
this will result in reconciliation in South Africa.50 Only later, in one of the
unofficial fora of South African reconciliation, did he express how he really
felt. Doxtaders observation that we should listen to the unofficial story of
reconciliation, as well as to its pub- lic pronouncements, should be heeded as we
consider the possibilities of reconcili- ation within the context of the United
States.
In considering those possibilities, I believe that we must take into consideration the similarities and differences between the two contexts. The most obvious

similarity is their mutual adherence to the Racial Contract: Their subsequent

evolution has been somewhat different, but defenders of South Africas system of
apartheid often argued that U.S. criticism was hypocritical in light of its own history of jim crow, explains Mills, especially since de facto segregation
remains sufficiently entrenched that even today, forty years after Brown v.
Board of Education, two American sociologists can title their study American
Apartheid.51
If the American example is any indication, it may take many years before the
promises of reconciliation are fulfilled in material and political terms. Even more
troubling, the rhetoric of reconciliation might be turned on its head or perverted
to support the very historical situations that it is supposed to remedy. For example, in the United States, a southern neoconfederate white minority has constructed a rhetoric of reconciliation that Edward Sebesta describes as nothing but
appeasement with a force that is fundamentally opposed to American ideas.
Reconciliation is a frequent justification for some demand of the neoconfederates.
The caving in to Ku Klux Klan violence during Reconstruction and overlooking the
rise of the Bourbon South with its Jim Crow laws, one-party states, and
disenfranchisement of both white poor and blacks were done under the loud refrain
of reconciliation.52

This neoconfederate rhetoric, which resists all of the requirements necessary for
genuine reconciliation, has had a profound impact on conversations about race in
the United States. Its impact can be seen in the national unwillingness to apologize
for slavery, and in the anti-reparations rhetoric that dominates public discourse.53
Neoconfederates have no interest in apologizing for slavery, addressing its
history, or taking responsibility for its consequences. They deny the need for
reparations. They have influenced, and are in confederation with, many of the
most powerful white people in America. Systematically the Lost Cause supporters
have erased or eliminated opposition and gotten the national government to honor
Confederates. Over the years little has stood in their way to re-write history.54
Their rhetoric of reconciliation returns us again to the question with which I began
this inquiry: Will white people ever be sorry?
The most credible answer, I believe, is that some will. There have always been,
and will always be, people of European descent committed to resigning the
Racial Contract. Some have actually given their lives for the strugglethe
white American antislavery revolutionary John Brown, the white members of the
African National Congress, who died trying to abolish apartheid, notes Mills. But
the mere fact of their existence shows what was possible, throwing into contrast
and render- ing open for moral judgment the behavior of their fellow whites, who
chose to accept Whiteness instead.55 The foundation for such moral judgments
will rest upon the coherence between principle and practice, between words and
deeds, between rhetoric and action. It will also be defined by a willingness to
atone, to reconcile

with self. To the degree that this willingness is faithfully felt, is sincere, then
and only thencan it be judged credible. The third blade of rhetorics propeller,
ethos, then, frames fundamental questions with which we must grapple if we are to
discover or create dialogic coherence somewhere in the process of
reconciliation.56
In concluding, I return to the questions of credibility and character with which
I began this inquiry, and again to the words of Malcolm X. Many black men, the
victimsin fact, most black menwould like to be able to forgive, to forget the
crimes. But most American white people seem not to have it in them to make any
serious atonementto do justice to the black man.57 This is the sentiment I
expressed in The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited, and if we are to take seriously
Hatchs call it must enter our theoretical and political conversations about race.
As I have argued in much of my research, for black people this means
acknowledging the ways in which we are implicated in systems of racial
oppression and embracing coherence in order to re-sign the rhetoric of racism. It
means much the same for whites, but it demands more than a re-signing of the
rhetoric of racism, and a more credible response than a rewriting the history of
race. If we are to achieve genuine racial reconciliation, white people must resign
the racial contract. That is, they must relinquish the power and privileges conferred
upon them by virtue of their race.
To resign the Racial Contract, whites must collectively atone for the history and
consequences of white supremacy. I continue to believe that this collective atonement is unlikely. However, in theorizing reconciliation as Hatch suggests, we can
look to those whites who have made an unambiguous and credible commitment to
racial justice and equality through their actions.58 Rhetorical scholars might then
examine the success with which they are able to convince other whites to do the
same, and translate that success into a coherent rhetoric of reconciliation. While
there is much to learn from black rhetoric, as well as from the ways in which
blacks and whites complicitously construct racial difference and identity, I believe
that the most fruitful future inquiries into the rhetoric of racism will focus on
questions of character and credibility. I conclude with Malcolm Xs advice:
Where the really sincere white people have got to do their proving of themselves is
not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where Americas racism
really isand thats in their own home communities: Americas racism is among
their fel- low whites. Thats where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish
something have got to work.59

NOTES
1. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965),
370.
2. Quoted in Lyn S. Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model?
(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 52.

3. James S. Baumlin, Ethos, in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 263.
4. John B. Hatch, Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric
of Racism, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003): 73764.
5. Hatch, Reconciliation, 755.
6.

Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). In
exploring the Racial Contract from a rhetorical perspective, Ive chosen to invoke a Burkean
perspective by incongruity and crack open the term resign. Reading the rhetoric of race in
black and white, the term has dual uses: for black rhetors, it portends a re-signing, that is, a
calling into question and redefinition of the terms of the contract, while for white rhetors it
amounts to both this and an active giving up of those powers and privileges. For more on
Burkes perspective by incon- gruity, see Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose,
3d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

7.

Aaron David Gresson III, The Recovery of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995). In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Gresson argues, white
political and economic recovery efforts in America have resulted largely in judicial,
occupational, and sym- bolic losses for Blacks and others previously targeted for so-called
mainstreaming (12).

8.

Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the
Rhetoric of Place, 18701875 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), 198.

9. Wilson, Reconstruction Desegregation Debate, 198.

10. Wilson, Reconstruction Desegregation Debate, 199.
11. Mills, The Racial Contract, 130.
12. Wilson, Reconstruction Desegregation Debate, 199.
13. Baumlin, Ethos, 276.
14. Hatch, Reconciliation, 755.
15. Eric Yamamoto, Interracial Justice: Conflict and Reconciliation in PostCivil Rights America (New
York: New York University Press, 1999),
254.
16. According to Graham C. Kinloch, the improvement of race relations and the reduction of
racism in colonial societies require increase in the participation of minorities in the decisionmaking process. Graham C. Kinloch, The Dynamics of Race Relations: A Sociological Analysis
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1974), 218.
17. Philippe-Joseph Salazar, An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South
Africa
(London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), xvii.
18. Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (Lanham,
Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), ix.
19. Graybill observes: There is no precise definition for ubuntu, but it connotes humaneness, caring, and community. Ubuntu derives from the Xhosa expression Umuntu ngumuntu
ngabanye bantu (People are people through other people). Graybill, Truth and
Reconciliation in South Africa, 32.
20. I discuss the notions of an integrative Afrocentricity and spiritually inspired militancy as
black rhetorical practices that correspond to rhetorical coherence. More recently, I have
suggested that black rhetoric is reconstitutive in character, and that this aspect of black rhetoric
reveals the ways in which race shapes and constrains interracial rhetorical situations. See
Mark Lawrence McPhail, From Complicity to Coherence: Rereading the Rhetoric of
Afrocentricity, Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 11440; Mark Lawrence
McPhail, Dessentializing

Difference: Transformative Visions in Contemporary Black Thought, Howard Journal of

Communications 13 (2002): 7796; and Mark Lawrence McPhail, Louis Abdul Farrakhan,
in Contemporary American Orators, ed. Richard Leeman and Bernard Duffy (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, in press).
21. Vincent Crapanzano, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (New York: Random House, 1985), 20.
22. Mills, The Racial Contract, 1314.
23. Mills, The Racial Contract, 1617.
24. Salazar, An African Athens, 79.
25. Salazar, An African Athens, 91.
26. Don Foster, What Makes a Perpetrator: An Attempt to Understand, in Looking Back,
Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, ed.
Charles Villa- Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press,
2000), 229.
27. Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, 22.
28. Biko writes: The victims of apartheid have shown huge tolerance regarding those responsible
for their suffering. Yet, while the National Party changed its name to the New National Party,
FW de Klerk still cannot remember for what he needed to apologize. PW Botha also did not
think it nec- essary to apologise. Nkosinathi Biko, Amnesty and Denial, in Villa-Vicencio
and Verwoerd, Looking Back, Reaching Forward, 197.
29. Yamamoto, Interracial Justice, 273.
30. Foster, What Makes a Perpetrator, 21920.
31. Hatch, Reconciliation, 754.
32. Mills, The Racial Contract, 18.
33. Baumlin, Ethos, 275.
34. Mills, The Racial Contract, 19.
35. Positive self-representation is an important persuasive strategy of symbolic and modern racism.
According to Teun A. van Dijk, argumentative and rhetorical strategies will typically play a
role as part of an overall strategy of persuasion, whereas semantic moves of apparent denial or
con- cession may be used in a combined strategy of positive self-presentation and negative
presenta- tion of the Other. Teun A. van Dijk, Elite Discourse and Racism (Newbury Park,
Calif.: Sage,
1993), 35.
36. Hatch focuses on my comments regarding the possibility of race being transformed by rational
means, but elsewhere I have suggested also that even approaches more focused on the emotional
and dialogic approaches to discourse fail to achieve racial transformation. See Mark Lawrence
McPhail, Race and the (Im)possibility of Dialogue, in Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in
Communication Studies, ed. Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna (Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2004), 20924.
37. Hatch, Reconciliation, 754.
38. Mills, The Racial Contract, 133.
39. David J. Cope, African Americans in the White City: The Worlds Columbian Exposition of
1893, http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/resources/lessonplans/hs_es_columbianexposition.htm.
40. Martin Luther King Jr., I See the Promised Land, in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that
Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992),
197.
41. Deborah F. Atwater and Sandra L. Herndon, The Use of Public Space as Cultural
Communicator: How Museums Reconstruct and Reconnect Cultural Memory, in
Understanding

African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations, ed. Ronald L. Jackson
II and Elaine Richardson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 79.
42. Atwater and Herdon, The Use of Public Space, 79.
43. Baumlin, Ethos, 275.
44. I believe that the concept of implicature that I explore in my work extends the theory of rhetorical coherence in the tragicomic direction that Hatch suggests can move race relations to coherent reconciliation. See Karen L. Dace and Mark Lawrence McPhail, Crossing the Color Line:
From Empathy to Implicature in Intercultural Communication, in Readings in Rhetorical
Contexts, ed. Judith N. Martin, Thomas K. Nakayama, and Lisa A. Flores (Mountain View,
Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1998), 43442. Also see McPhail, Dessentializing
Difference.
45. Aaron David Gresson III, Americas Atonement: Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the
Pedagogy of Healing (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 127.
46. Gresson, Americas Atonement, 127.
47. Like Hatch, Gresson suggests that a move toward pathos might facilitate racial reconciliation. He
does, however, caution against drawing comparisons between the United States and South
Africa, and implicitly considers both the ways in which the Racial Contract continues to
undermine coherent reconciliation, and the necessity for atonement for the resigning of the
Racial Contract: At present, South Africa is working through its dialectical heritage. In the
United States, the var- ious liberation efforts of the past three decades also have been churning
along toward some form of stasis. But the South African and American struggles for racial
equality are very different species of human struggle. In the United States, the concession to
racial minorities was and remains an accommodation. It is because this adjustment was largely
symbolic and involved ver- bal and visual strategies that compromised traditional white
self-other understandings that recovery and atonement are necessary (135).
48. Erik Doxtader, Making Rhetorical History in a Time of Transition: The Occasion,
Constitution, and Representation of South African Reconciliation, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4
(2001): 254.
49. Doxtader, Making Rhetorical History, 254.
50. Quoted in Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, 52.
51. Mills, The Racial Contract, 28
52. Edward Sebesta, On the Subject of the Proposed Confederate Memorial Plaque at Harvard
University, http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/HARVARD.htm.
53. For a critique of the anti-reparations rhetoric of David Horowitz and its implications for the
rhetoric of racism, see Thomas Farrell and Mark Lawrence McPhail, Reparations or
Separation? The Rhetoric of Racism in Black and White, Proceedings of the Fifth
Conference of the International Study for Argumentation, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren, J.
Anthony Blair, Charles A. Willard, and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans (Amsterdam: Sic Sat,
2003), 3017.
54. Sebesta, On the Subject of the Proposed Confederate Memorial Plaque.
55. Mills, The Racial Contract, 109.
56. Hatch, Reconciliation, 756.
57. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 370.
58. I am thinking here of the narratives offered by the white volunteers who participated in the
Freedom Summer of 1964 voter registration and education initiatives in Mississippi. African
American James Chaney and two white civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner, who were among the first volunteers to go to Mississippi, disappeared and were
later discovered buried in an earthen dam. Despite their deaths, over eight hundred volunteers,
many

of whom were white, went to Mississippi to live and work with black people, and their
narratives offer important insights into the ways in which individuals, when confronted with the
lived real- ity of the Racial Contract, become energized to dismantle it. See Elizabeth Sutherland
Martinez, ed., Letters from Mississippi: Personal Reports from Civil Rights Workers of the
1964 Freedom Summer (Brookline, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2002), or Doug McAdam, Freedom
Summer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
59. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 376.