As we near the beginning of 2022, many of us will set goals and intentions for the year ahead. While I believe this ought to happen year-round, as I spoke about in my last post, I appreciate the prompt to pause, take stock of where I’ve been, and be thoughtful about where I can grow. I am learning to welcome the opportunities to acknowledge my missteps, my blind spots, and set commitments to rectify those moving forward.
Much of this has revolved around grounding my work in equity and justice. One way I’ve been working on this is by expanding my focus on harms from the interpersonal to the collective. I’ve been bringing more attention to how restorative justice demands the same kind of accountability and repair for harms and state violence toward large groups of people as it does between individuals. Only if restorative justice and conflict transformation can speak to these collective harms and wrongdoings, will it guide us toward a vision of a more liberated and just world.
Most of my learning about how we get there has pointed to a set of approaches and practices that often go under the umbrella of truth and reconciliation. Many of us have likely heard of more well-known truth and reconciliation processes, such as those in South Africa and Rwanda. Fewer of us probably know about Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission following a devastating massacre in 1979 in which Ku Klux Klan members killed five peaceful demonstrators and wounded ten others. We may not know about the 2015 Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work to uncover truths about the horrific harm done to the native Wabanaki community by Maine’s child welfare system. And even today, we see initiatives like The Truth Telling Project, which was founded by activists in the St. Louis area to create spaces for people to speak publicly about their experiences with police brutality and institutional racism.
There are many steps that will be needed to fully address and take accountability for these collective harms that probably include restitution, reparations, and transforming systems that continue to inflict harm on marginalized communities. But the pre-requisite to all of these steps is telling the truth. Lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson speaks to this when he says,
I think we all want reconciliation. We want peace, we want understanding, we want redemption—all of these wonderful things. But we haven’t committed ourselves to truth-telling. Truth and reconciliation are not simultaneous. They are sequential. Tell the truth first, and it’s the truth that motivates you to understand what it will take to recover, repair, endure—to reconcile.
While we may feel powerless as individuals to counter the continued violence and discrimination we see every day in this country, we can at least begin by telling the truth. We can educate ourselves on shameful events in our history that are rarely taught. We can challenge insidious mythologies, like stories and imagery of Thanksgiving that mask the truth of slaughter, land theft, and displacement of Native Americans. In our families, organizations, faith communities, and beyond we can acknowledge where these collective harms have happened and continue to happen. Not, ultimately, to remain in this darkness but because we know that it will lead us, eventually, toward the light.