ABSTRACT
Conflicts involving overt or subtle racism and sexism — or sometimes both — are probably the most volatile and least understood of any that a dispute resolver is called upon to handle. Despite their ugliness and severity, conflicts fueled by discrimination remain a relatively untouched area in the ever-burgeoning dispute resolution literature. Agreement and disagreement, conflict and cooperation are all dependent upon and given meaning by the culture within which they occur. Culture organizes and is constituted by beliefs, norms, behaviors and institutional practices. Much of the literature on cultural differences in conflict is valuable for alerting us to the ethnocentricities inherent in many of the styles, concepts, values, and practices of contemporary western dispute resolution. Racism is embedded in relations of domination and oppression or domination and subordination. These relations create and impose a dynamic of their own on all who live within them and who then, themselves reproduce those relations.
