In The Price of Racial Reconciliation, Ronald W. Walters maintains that white Americans have not faced up to the injustice of the Atlantic slave trade nor taken stock of the damage slavery has done to black communities in the United States today. Comforted by a narrative that vaunts their country as a democratic beacon, America's white majority remains mostly oblivious to the ongoing “inferiorization” (183) of the black minority and the deeply imbalanced “opportunity structure” (100) legislators and power brokers have maintained in the wake of de jure abolition. When it registers at all, the suffering of blacks strikes most whites as an anomaly, the last vestiges of a discredited society that failed to secure true equality of opportunity. According to this perspective, the United States has moved on from these past failings, largely cleansed and mostly repaired.

Walters, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, asserts a different reality. Picking up on the themes that Randall Robinson outlined in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (Dutton, 2000), Walters views the mainstream perspective of whites as a “false memory” (11). As he argues in this insightful and provocative (and angry) treatise on the experience of U.S. democracy, there still exists “an organic phenomenon of oppression” (4), which has been exacerbated by the material effects of slavery and legitimated by a state that has sanctioned “the choice of [its] citizens to conduct various forms of subordination of Black people” (78–79). As Walters sees it, Americans, black and white alike, do not yet live in full democratic freedom and, for that matter, never have. Liberal reforms that sought to promote structural equality in the cold war era—Walters tackles both the civil rights movement and the affirmative action initiatives it later spawned—lacked a sufficiently restorative core either to remediate the losses that blacks incurred during the eras of slavery and Jim Crow or to expose the role of the state in effecting those losses. Never rising even to the level of a partial fix, these failed attempts at justice are merely the remnants of a no-longer-troubled national conscience. Nearly half a century after Lyndon Johnson promised to set the nation on a new course, Americans are still waiting for the Great Society to take shape, but only a few today are waiting in earnest. Even black Americans, Walters notes, have largely given up on the promise of integration leading to racial reconciliation, as most concluded decades ago that a community without the economic means to exercise its rights cannot enjoy equality in a capitalist society in any true sense. Looking back over the past, then, Walters concludes, “The immorality of slavery has been compounded by the modern failure to acknowledge that the grandeur of this country was based, in substantial part, upon the monumental resources made possible by African labor. The failure to acknowledge the contributions of Africans is an act of social theft, removing from society its real heroic virtue. Moreover, it is a theft that has been repeated in each age, corrupting what passes for American history and the education upon which it is founded” (9). This is more or less the same springboard from which Robinson launched his project in 2000. So what, then, is new here?

The principal achievement of Walters's study is his lithe and nimble methodology. Rooted firmly in the realm of comparative politics, Walters also frames his arguments in favor of reparations against a backdrop of engaging global history. In chapters and subsections scattered throughout the book, Walters takes up important and compelling case studies (e.g., South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Australian debates concerning the treatment of Aborigines, and the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban in 2002) to suggest that the price of reconciliation has already been explored productively in a variety of different settings and contexts. The spread of reparations talk in the last two decades, in other words, represents the globalization of a new understanding of social responsibility that embraces both the past and present. Walters concedes that reparations alone will not solve the U.S. race problem, but he believes they can effectively set the stage for a more robust dialogue on the creation of additional correctives. The demand for reparations, therefore, is not simply a request for repayment on the debt highlighted by Randall Robinson, it is understood here as a step toward reconciliation made on the basis of black self-determination (188). That is to say, reparations talk, for Walters, is not only (and not chiefly) about money, it is about reexamining our national memory to take better account of “the complicity of the state in the ongoing suffering of Blacks” (222) and to ignite a new conversation regarding the experience of democracy in this country, something which can undoubtedly benefit whites and blacks alike.