Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice.

• Author: Jovanovic, Spoma
• Position: Book review

Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice. By John B. Hatch. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008; pp. 420. $90.00 cloth; $38.95 paper.

In John B. Hatch's Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice, the author travels a rhetorically-inspired path to teach his readers and understand himself how the tragic legacy of slavery had escaped, until rather recently, earnest expressions of regret, apology, and social change. Hatch documents international and local instances of reconciliation that have inspired a new rhetoric of reconciliation defined as "a dialogic rhetorical process of rectifying wrongs and healing relationships between parties, in ways that promote their common good" (p. 9). In a fluid, engrossing tome, Hatch blends communication theories and their philosophical underpinnings, to recent global and national events about which many readers will likely be unaware, to underscore the processes by which racial reconciliation has at last found hope and promise in the United States.

Central to Hatch's proposition is that discourses of reconciliation can pave the way to difficult and dialogic conversations surrounding the existence and remediation options for racial disparities, systemic injustices, and material reparations. To do so, communities need to embrace an ethical coherence in peace-inspiring activities. The task requires confronting social and psychological barriers, acknowledging past human rights violations, pursuing truth bound in facts and history, offering symbolic gestures of contrition, seeking opportunities for forgiveness, and imagining the conditions under which the transformation of relationships could occur as a matter of justice.

Race and Reconciliation is written for communication scholars and academics of other disciplines studying the democratic possibilities for peace amid violence. It is a book that speaks as well to political leaders and community activists working to advance social justice to remedy the disparities among racial groups that continue to grow despite well intended social services and remediation efforts that have fallen short of making adequate progress. Hatch draws from the discourses of Benin, West Africa's 1999 Leaders' Conference on Reconciliation and Development, as well as recent reconciliation initiatives in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina to illustrate the power and influence of particular discourses to inspire more generalized action within local politics...