The Mendacity of Reconciliation in an Age of Resentment
| Author | David W. McIvor |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12198 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
The Mendacity of Reconciliation in an Age
of Resentment
By DAVI D W. MCIVOR*
ABSTRACT. The political ideal of reconciliation has gained increased
prominence in recent decades, in part due to political experiments
such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and
other formal or informal truth or reconciliation processes. Here, I argue
that there is a fundamental mendacity to reconciliation, given stubborn
asymmetries of social power and disrespect. Reconciliation as an ideal
carries an impetus towards resolution that covers over the necessary
role that conflict plays in political struggles—including the role that
conflict plays within struggles for reconciliation. Nevertheless, despite
the mendacity of reconciliation, its meaning still holds political value.
Reconciliation implies an orientation towards social repair, which even
the strongest critics of reconciliation cannot bring themselves to reject.
Some lies are worse than others, and some lies might be noble or
necessary. Reconciliation is the latter—a fiction that is less pernicious
than its absence. In this light, the task is to locate means of political
reconciliation that do not obscure the conflicts and asymmetries of
social life but enable social actors to face up to these conflicts and to
discover novel ways to repair the damage that they can do.
“The last god to be still is Disagreement.”
– Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes
What remains of reconciliation as a political ideal in an age of resent-
ment (Mishra 2017)?In the wake of the 2008 election of Barack Obama,
manic claims about a “post-racial” America found at least some reso-
nance in public opinion polls showing a broad increase in optimism
*Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University. Author of
Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss (Cornell 2016). Email: david.mci-
vor@colostate.edu
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 5 (November, 2017).
DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12198
V
C2017 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.
surrounding race relations. Yet this optimism quickly morphed into a
toxic mixture of disappointment and rage, further intensified by par-
tisan polarization that was itself increasingly racialized. Public opin-
ion in recent years has been marked by a racial “spillover effect”—a
growing influence of racial attitudes on seemingly nonracial issues
including dog breeds and Oscar nominations—and the major politi-
cal parties have consolidated around racial identities and attitudes
(Tesler 2016: 5–7).
Obama’s presidency was synchronous with the rise of new forms
of black activism, yet the activism of Black Lives Matter and other
groups was motivated by enduring and even intensifying experien-
ces of unequal treatment and disrespect that belied claims about a
post-racial society. Explicit and implicit racial cues dominated the
2016 presidential election cycle, leading to the election of Donald
Trump, who had made his reentry into politics through a campaign
to question the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate and who
launched his campaign with explicit racial claims about Mexican
immigrants.
This context is important for understanding the value of reconcilia-
tion as a political ideal. The color line remains—in the United States
and elsewhere—one of the most salient lines of political division, mis-
trust, and resentment. In the quarter-century before the election of
Obama, discourses and novel practices of reconciliation gained a
unique prominence during what scholars referred to as the “age of
apology.” Marked mostvividly by the South African Truth and Reconcil-
iation Commission (1994–2000), societies in transition and settled con-
stitutional democracies alike committed themselves to a number of
public examination projects surrounding the historical and enduring
violence and injustices associated with colonialism, racial discrimina-
tion, genocide, and violent revolutionary struggles (Gibney 2009;
Minow 1999; Hayner 2010). From Capetown to Kigali to Greensboro,
North Carolina and Portland, Maine, formal and informal reconciliation
projects enjoined participants to investigate traumatic events and pain-
ful divisions in the name of social understanding and repair (McIvor
2016a). Such efforts face new challenges in an age of resentment, yet
even in the best of circumstances reconciliation is a vexed practice and
problematic ideal. Given asymmetries of social power, is reconciliation
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology1134
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