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From Bujumbura to Mogadishu: Ethnic Solidarity, African Reality, American Implications: Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, by Keith B. Richburg. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Pp. 251. $24.00 (hardcover).
HARRY HUTCHISON*
We've got rooms full of people with their heads cut off. Their bodies follow behind.
Rooms full of people with packaged thoughts, and reality redesigned.
Unrestrained people with guns to accent their constipated sentiment. And vision is fraught with ambiguity in a decapitated society.
Jan Krist1
We are often the captives of our pictures of the world, and in the end, if the world does not look just like them, their influence on our perceptions is nevertheless profound.
. . . Pictures lead not only to predictions but also to principles. Our vision of what is guides our approach to what ought to be.
Jerry L. Mashaw2
I. INTRODUCTION
Americans live in an era that has observed the contentious passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative,3 has seen the rancor generated by the Hopwood v. Texas4 decision, and has heard assertions by one distinguished advocate that another celebrated commentator has dealt the race card from the bottom of the deck.5 This begs the question: How did the American democracy arrive at a rights debate that appears shorn of reason, nuance, and civility? There are, of course, several answers.
H.L.A. Hart is surely right in his claim that "if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free."6 As Charles Taylor illumines, such claims are most often made in the context of liberal democracies that arose after the collapse of stable social hierarchies, which "used to be the basis for honor"7 and were "intrinsically linked to inequalities."8 In place of honor, the natural and equal right of all men to be free metamorphosed into the notion of dignity. We now talk of dignity, some argue in a universalist and egalitarian sense, to mean, among other things, the "inherent dignity of human beings."9 Equal dignity, at least in a democratic context, has been transmuted into the demand for equal recognition, "which has taken various forms over the years, and has now returned in the form of demands...