Identity Politics Redux: Apologies for Historical Injustice and Deliberation about Race.

This paper examines the role played by demands for apology and restitution for past injustices visited upon minorities, in the deliberative process, and the political and theoretical consequences of these demands. Deliberative democratic theory arose in the 1990s in large part as a response to frustration with identity politics - which, critics contended, trapped people within their increasingly splintered groups, and made any politics of solidarity based around commitment to a civic project impossible. Deliberative democratic theory aimed to sidestep divisive questions of identity by emphasizing shared commitment to a code of rational discourse. Like greeting and testimony, however, apology forces us to reconsider the questions of recognition and status. In any speaking situation, participants must first recognize each other as interlocutors before conversation may proceed. Apology is the acknowledgment of a wrong and the expression of regret which aims to repair the relationship between the parties. It acknowledges the interlocutor’s suffering, and the self-understanding of the interlocutor as one who has, crucially, experienced that suffering. Power relations are transformed, so that parties are now acknowledged as equals in the speech situation about to proceed. The paper argues that attempts to restore and make restitution for past injustices which do not admit apology - deliberation without acknowledgment - are doomed to failure. It examines in detail two cases: the demands for apology for slavery made by African Americans and the impact of these for the ‘conversations on race’ which the Clinton Administration sponsored in the 1990s, and the demands for apologies to Australia’s indigenous peoples for the practice of forced child removal, and their impact on national reconciliation. The demands for apology which periodically resurfaced in these conversations expressed the claims of status and recognition on the part of minorities which could not be addressed in the deliberative terms of these conversations. I conclude that rational deliberation must in these cases be preceded by communicative exchange which acknowledges the status of parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]