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Books by
Ronald Walters
Black Presidential Politics in America
(1989) /
Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora
(1993) /
African American Leadership (1999)
Bibliography of African American
Leadership: An Annotated Guide (2000)
White Nationalism Black Interests
(2003)
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Ronald W. Walters.
The Price of Racial Reconciliation
University of
Michigan Press (January 22, 2008) 264 pages
About the Book
The issue of
reparations in America provokes a lot of interest, but
the public debate usually occurs at the level of
historical accounting: "Who owes what for slavery?" This
book attempts to get past that question to address
racial restitution within the framework of larger
societal interests. For example, the answer to the "why
reparations?" question is more than the moral of payment
for an injustice done in the past. Ronald Walters
suggests that, insofar as the impact of slavery is still
very much with us today and has been reinforced by forms
of post-slavery oppression, the objective of racial
harmony will be disrupted unless it is recognized with
the solemnity and amelioration it deserves. The author
concludes that the grand narrative of black oppression
in the United States—which contains the past and present
summary of the black experience—prevents racial
reconciliation as long as some substantial form of
racial restitution is not seriously considered. This is
"the price" of reconciliation.
The method for
achieving this finding is grounded in comparative
politics, where the analyses of institutions and
political behaviors are standard approaches. The author
presents the conceptual difficulties involved in the
project of racial reconciliation by comparing South
African Truth and Reconciliation and the demand for
reparations in the United States.
Reviews
In The
Price of Racial Reconciliation, Ronald Walters offers an
abundance of riches. This book provides an
extraordinarily comprehensive and persuasive set of
arguments for reparations, and will be the lens through
which meaningful opportunities for reconciliation are
viewed in the future. If this book does not lead to the
success of the reparations movement, nothing will.
—Charles J.
Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law
School
The Price of Racial Reconciliation is a seminal study of
comparative histories and race(ism) in the formation of
state structures that prefigure(d) socioeconomic
positions of Black peoples in South Africa and the
United States. The scholarship is meticulous in
brilliantly constructed analysis of the politics of
memory, reparations as an immutable principle of
justice, imperative for nonracial(ist) democracy, and a
regime of racial reconciliation.
—James Turner,
Professor of African and African American Studies and
Founder, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell
University
A fascinating and path-breaking analysis of the attempt
at racial reconciliation in South Africa which asks if
that model is relevant to the contemporary American
racial dilemma. An engaging multidisciplinary approach
relevant to philosophy, sociology, history, and
political science.
—William
Strickland, Associate Professor of Political Science,
W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies,
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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