July 31, 2008, 10:38 AM ET

A Racial Apologetic

It was 1997 when President Bill Clinton apologized to the eight remaining victims of “The Tuskegee Experiment.” Those eight survivors were non-consenting participants in a long-term medical study conducted during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s that denied black men available treatment for syphilis so that scientists could easily determine how the disease mutilated their bodies.

Earlier this month, the American Medical Association issued a formal apology for its organization’s past discrimination against black physicians, a form of purposeful racial exclusion that prompted black doctors to create their own parallel organization, the National Medical Association, at the end of the 19th century. (I didn’t even realize that the NMA still operates today.)

This week, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing to all African-Americans “on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow,” according to an Associated Press report. The House publicly accepted responsibility for the role it played in justifying and perpetuating antebellum chattel slavery and its post-bellum, segregationist outgrowth. (The Senate didn’t sign onto this particular resolution, but they apologized in 2005 for not passing anti-lynching laws during the 19th and 20th centuries.)

But what are we to make of these official gestures of contrition? Do they matter? Are they too little, too late? A disingenuous form of racial pandering?

After you answer those questions for yourself, might it be possible to think about how to translate such formal decrees (and the spirit of reconciliation they ostensibly represent) into the decidedly more informal dynamics of everyday inter-racial relationships?

I keep telling people that real “cross-racial talk” will certainly combine rational argumentation with heated emotionalism, apologies with unabashed indifference, guilt with intractable cynicism. Race is too affect-laden and messy a construct for anything else. It might be a bit foolish, I’d argue, for any scholar or pundit to imagine that they can bracket emotionalism out of their analyses of racial ideology and its sociopolitical implications. Without that, what’s even left to talk about?

Readers of my new book on race-based skepticism in America, at least the sympathetic ones, have e-mailed to ask me how I might translate the book’s ideas into a tangible organizing principle for structuring any nation-wide “conversation about race” (that oft-cited but under-theorized ambition), a conversation that should do more than just talk us further back into our own racial camps or gingerly paper over the uglier underbelly of our racial commitments.

If I ever get the time, I would love to take a crack at devising a practical method (a kind of guidebook) for instantiating public and private discussions that might create safer spaces within which people can be honest with one another (and themselves) about their complicated racial feelings/beliefs — but in ways that could also allow us all to actively listen ourselves into a novel imagining of multi-racial possibility/community in the 21st century.

This wouldn’t be about “racial therapy,” an interventionist mode that other scholars have powerfully and roundly critiqued. Instead, it would start off by simply trying to get people to listen to others’ positions on race so as to understand how and why they have come to espouse them, even and especially the folks who think any discussion of race at all is a total waste of their time.