Appeals to common cause are most likely to prove effective if the parties to the disagreement actually have a pressing common goal and if cooperation will help more than hinder them in achieving that goal. The CRS movement has searched for new theories and ideas in race relations as a result of the decline of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. New forms of scholarship have included parables, stories, and counterstories to show the false necessity of most current civil rights doctrine. The possibilities of reconciliation, through the plea of common cause, is examined here using two imagined colloquies between the CRS school and the mainstream civil rights movement. The first involves merit, a recurring element in scholarship regarding racial justice, and the other involves context, an essential element to many CRS adherents, feminists, and other postmodernist theorists. The author believes the two schools cannot be reconciled because they view the race problem in different terms and offer radically different ways to resolve it. 66 notes