Forgiveness Via Disassociation: Reconciling the Problem of the Color Line

Progress—its meaning, possibility, and the means of achieving it—is of fundamental concern in the philosophy of race. This essay examines how progress—via apology, forgiveness, and disassociation—has been possible after certain historical tragedies, while demonstrating the special problems that make Du Bois’s ‘problem of the color line’ a disanalogous situation to previous cases. Section one offers a characterization of the nature of genuine apologies. Section two illustrates this characterization by analyzing the atrocities committed by Nazis during WWII. Special attention is given to an examination of how a hermeneutic shift became possible, i.e., how we today can share with contemporary Germans a ‘shared memory’ in which we are located equally. Section three addresses the unique problematic of racial progress in the USA that makes disassociation especially difficult, before attempting to sketch a way forward in section four.