This is the moment for an American Truth and Reconciliation process

A dam has broken. An enormous shift has propelled white recognition that systemic racism against Black Americans is real, that police violence against Black Americans is an epidemic, that platitudes won’t change behavior, that Black lives matter, and that whites must join with Black Americans and other people of color to change our society. Millions of white Americans are suddenly demanding change. But how? How can a country steeped in inequality confront its past and change its future? This is the moment for an American Truth and Reconciliation process. 

A Truth and Reconciliation process requires a country to face its past with a thorough public airing of its human rights violations, and to seek forgiveness. It may be accompanied by reparations or other forms of recognizing its collective debt. Dr. King talked about that debt in his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, complaining that “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.” Until now, too many white Americans have been in denial about that debt, and about the current continuing disadvantage faced by Black Americans. 

Over a score of nations since the 1980s have undergone Truth and Reconciliation, most notably Argentina, Chile, and South Africa. Argentina used a Truth and Reconciliation process to help uncover and seek resolution of the crimes of the junta who ruled the country from 1975-83, and murdered some 30,000 political opponents, most of whom were young people. A few years later Chile used a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate and seek resolution for the crimes of the Pinochet regime. 

In South Africa, when the white apartheid government fell in free elections, and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress took control of the nation, Mandela turned to a Truth and Reconciliation process to uncover the many crimes of the apartheid government and seek a moral resolution. Bishop Desmond Tutu led three commissions, covering human rights violations, amnesty, and rehabilitation and reparations. Canada used a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the treatment of Native students at residential schools, and Germany used one after unification to investigate the human rights violations of the East German state. 

Although the term Truth and Reconciliation wasn’t used, in some ways Germany after World War II is a model of the benefits of airing a nation’s wrongdoing and seeking to make amends. In the wake of its military defeat, Germany underwent a de-Nazification process that required every German citizen to confront the terrible crimes of the Holocaust. Seventy-five years after the end of the war, Germans today continue to recognize collective responsibility for the racist crimes of the Nazi era, and German law bans any speech or acts that glorify its criminal past. 

There are no displays of Nazi symbols in Germany, no monuments to Nazi generals, no flags with Swastikas, no streets named for Nazi leaders. 

Earlier this summer, Representative Barbara Lee introduced legislation in the House to form a “Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission” to acknowledge and memorialize systemic racism, and to seek progress in eliminating racial inequality. 

Representative Lee’s proposal will, of course, never be adopted by the current Senate or President. But that shouldn’t prevent us from moving forward. Over the years several Truth and Reconciliation commissions were privately run. For example, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated KKK killings in Greensboro in 1979, was privately organized and funded. 

By early next year, Joe Biden may be President. He could take a big step now in embracing a Truth and Reconciliation process by endorsing Representative Lee’s proposal, and by agreeing to appoint its members now as a private organization and ask them to get to work. Then, if he takes office in January, he can re-appoint them as a government commission. There’s no need to wait; This is the moment for an American Truth & Reconciliation process.

David B. Oppenheimer is a Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, at the UC Berkeley School of Law.