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tasked with overseeing national and localized efforts to empirically
document, educate the public and then propose remedies for the
extent to which our nation’s original sin—centuries of slavery, fol-
lowed by decades of legalized discrimination and oppression—still
weigh down Black Americans. The budget for such an office would
fall under the Department of Defense, Green said, since future law-
makers would be loath to approve cuts to defense spending.
It’s striking, experts say, that the United States has never undergone
such a process. While it’s true there have been commissions—the
Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s and the Christopher
Commission after the riots of the 1990s—the federal government
has never devoted significant resources to providing a sweeping
corrective to the enduring damage wrought by American slavery.
“If you look at countries comparable to the U.S. in their long histo-
ries of racial inequality, all of them except the United States have gone
through some sort of public reckoning of that past,” said Kathleen
Belew, a historian who has studied reconciliation processes and au-
thor of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramil-
itary America. “There are ways that racism and white supremacy are
deeply hidden inside many aspects of our society. A truth commis-
sion gives us an opportunity to get it all out on the table.”It’s a process that’s played out before, at the local level. Activists
in Greensboro, North Carolina launched a truth and reconciliation
process after the 1979 massacre in which white supremacists shot and
killed five anti-racist protesters. In Maine, Native officials underwent
a truth and reconciliation process to explain and address why tribal
youth were both overrepresented and mistreated in the child welfare
system. And in Detroit, local activists pressed the state for a truth
and reconciliation commission to definitively document the public
policy decisions that resulted in the region’s stark racial segregation.
“The best thing that can come from a truth commission is that
we narrow the range of permissible lies that we tell ourselves as
a community about our own history,” said Jill Williams, who ran
the Greensboro commission and has advised on others across the
country. “I think that could be helpful to America.”
One of the key components of any such commission is to estab-
lish a mutually accepted historical narrative. While we all live in the
same nation, white Americans and Black Americans believe funda-
mentally different things about what happened in our shared pasts,
much less about how it still affects us all today. And how far off are
we from having that type of shared history? Are we close?
“Oh, come on. No!” exclaimed Smithsonian Institute secretaryOF A CRUCIBLE MOMENT IN THIS COUNTRY.”
—phil agnew
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