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Clearly there is no
magical formula for righting historical wrongs.
Retrospective justice is a messy and imperfect
business, and societies and institutions that undertake
it should do so with humility and a clear-eyed
recognition of the inadequacy of any reparative
program to restore what was taken away.
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Yet looking at the experience of other societies that have
confronted (or failed to confront) legacies of historical
injustice – at the contrasting experiences of
West Germany, East Germany, and Japan following
World War II; at the operation of truth commissions
in South Africa and elsewhere; at the bitter
controversies spawned by the Turkish government’s
denial of the Armenian genocide or by the
Australian government’s refusal to apologize to
Aboriginal children abducted from their families as
part of a state-sponsored forced assimilation policy
– there seems good reason to believe that communities
that face their histories squarely emerge
stronger than those that choose the path of denial
and evasion.
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In the course of its research, the steering committee
was struck not only by the sheer variety of
reparative justice initiatives around the world but
also by the ambivalent response of many Americans
to these efforts. On one hand, Americans have
played a leading role in creating the international
humanitarian regime. Judges and prosecutors from
the United States laid the foundations of international
humanitarian law at Nuremberg, and it
was American military officials who drafted the first
German restitution and reparations policies for
victims of Nazi atrocities.
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U.S. courts and legislatures
have become the premier venues for reparations
claims of various sorts, and many American political
leaders have been outspoken in demanding that
leaders of other nations (particularly the current
government of Japan) acknowledge and make
amends for the misdeeds of their predecessors. On
the other hand, many Americans remain distinctly
uneasy about broaching aspects of their own history,
particularly in regard to slavery. While recent
years have seen a proliferation of national and
institutional apologies for various offenses, a proposed
apology for slavery – a one-sentence Congressional
resolution introduced in 1997 apologizing
to “African Americans whose ancestors
suffered as slaves under the Constitution and the
laws of the United States until 1865” – died before
it could even come up for discussion on the floor
of the House of Representatives. It is difficult to say
precisely where this reticence about slavery comes
from, but it seems to us to be a matter worthy of
further reflection.
gov360dotorg just uploaded a video:
The Democrats and Independents mostly skipped the last election, so the Republicans won big. The constitution calls for us to vote and also spells out our right to protest. GOV360 would like more people to do BOTH if they are unhappy with things in their government.
All of which leads to one final conclusion. If
this nation is ever to have a serious dialogue about
slavery, Jim Crow, and the bitter legacies they have
bequeathed to us, then universities must provide
the leadership. For all their manifold flaws and
failings, universities possess unique concentrations
of knowledge and skills. They are grounded in values
of truth seeking and the unfettered exchange
of ideas. They are at least relatively insulated from
political pressure. Perhaps most important, they
are institutions that value historical continuity,
that recognize and cherish the bonds that link the
present to the past and the future. The fact that so
many of our nation’s elite institutions have histories
that are entangled with the history of slavery only
enhances the opportunity and the obligation. | 
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