Truth or Consequences - America needs its own truth and reconciliation commission, but blacks stand in the way

By Debra J. Dickerson

Al Sharpton won the lottery and now it’s time for America to pay up. The good reverend’s windfall may well be the bes­t thing to happen to America’s devastating race problem since the Civil War.

Courtesy of a genealogy site trying to gain exposure, the controversial civil rights leader not only found out who his enslaved ancestors were, he found out exactly who enslaved them. That the late, powerful senator Strom Thurmond, among America’s most infamous racists and racial hypocrites, inherits that guilt and responsibility, just as he inherited his ancestors’ money and position, could not be more perfect. Blacks could not be more gleeful. To learn that some anonymous Joe Blow owned your ancestors is, while empowering, not to learn very much except that you have a connection to some embarrassed white folks in Virginia somewhere. But to learn that America’s leading segregationist, who also fathered an illegitimate biracial daughter, owned your ancestor is a priceless Gotcha! It’s American racial history efficiently reduced to a flash card for easy reference.

Sharpton and Thurmond turn out to be joined at the hip; they perfectly embody America’s modern racial history in all its ignominious mess and simultaneously chart a path to surmounting it. From the chaos of our racial morass, clarity. Clarity, that is, if we’re willing to honestly confront our racial history and look ourselves in the eyes. It will all have been for naught, though, if this search is undertaken either for black vengeance or white vindication. The truth, an honest historical reckoning, must be our only goal. Any other agenda will keep America in turmoil — whites trying to avoid the past, blacks unable to live in the present. Catharsis, the ritual cleansing that comes from confrontation with the truth, is needed all around, not just for blacks.

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Whites often wonder why blacks can’t “just get over” slavery and Jim Crow, since it all happened so long ago and, in the former case, no one is alive who was directly involved. In the latter, people can sit wherever they want on city buses now, so what’s the big deal? Aside from the blatant dishonesty of decoupling present effects in the black community from their obvious historical causes, those attitudes refuse to acknowledge the yawning chasm blacks face in understanding themselves. No matter how gruesomely tormented others have been throughout history, no other group has had their entire cultures, religions, languages, and ancestral homelands — their entire identities — ripped from them and replaced with a history of nothing but oppression and underachievement. Blacks are not a people, they’re a problem. They simply do not know who they are except the people who have been oppressed by whites. That is not an identity, it is a curse, and it is maddening.

For the same reason that even well adjusted adoptees so often search for their biological families, blacks want to know who they were and why they were treated so badly. No American who has ever proudly invoked the pioneers, the Founding Fathers, or our glorious role in World War II can claim that the past has no bearing on the present. No descendant of European immigrants who came after Emancipation but who attends a college established before 1865, or who gets probation for a crime that a black would get hard time for, can declare himself innocent of America’s racial history.

Obviously, there’s no answer to the “why” question, just as no adoptee will ever be totally reconciled to even the most compelling reasons for his being “given away.” But it’s only human to need to confront those responsible and ask the question. America’s refusing to answer this admittedly unanswerable demand is the reason blacks can’t just get over it; denying the validity of the question is a denial of black history and black present-day reality. Only the healthiest and luckiest can get over their victimization without a confession and restitution from their victimizer (something admittedly easier for each generation that comes along). Indeed, our criminal justice system is predicated on the notion that every victim needs his victimizer to face him, account for his crimes, and be responsible; this is no different.

While I may sound as if I’m heading toward a call for reparations, I am not. If America were to cut a check for a million dollars to every descendant of slaves tomorrow, it would heal no wounds. Reparations would actually worsen our racial problems, because they would legitimately entitle non-blacks to consider the discussion closed. In fact, if America truly wanted to end this discussion, the immediate payment of reparations would be the best way; the day that happens, we need not ever have another discussion about slavery, Jim Crow, or present racial conditions. If money changing hands is the solution, the problem has been solved, no? That would be like settling a lawsuit not because you’re culpable but because the cost of litigation is prohibitive; those blacks who would “settle” for reparations — some cold calculation of (great-grandma) x (some amount of dollars) — are most interested in hurting white people. Standing alone, reparations are blood money, and blacks have no right to trade their ancestors’ suffering for gold. Since history itself is the culprit, no meaningful confession could ever be forthcoming; since America worked so hard to bury its racial doings and not know, investigation must take the place of confession.

The only possible way forward for America is a truth and reconciliation process of the type employed by nations like South Africa and Rwanda, where horrific injustice was perpetrated on a national level. There could never be peace and healing for the victims while torturers and murderers walked freely among them, nor, given the scale of the crime, could the perpetrating group live with the knowledge that so many of their “brothers” were cast out of society for activities carried on in their name. Truth is the only balm. Like them, we can’t answer “why” since acts of genocide and apartheid are fundamentally irrational and hysterical. We can only answer “how.” And, in cases like Sharpton’s, “who.”

At the end of this truth and reconciliation process, it may be that money should change hands, but money must not be the point. This process must begin, and unerringly be gauged by, fealty to this question: What’s best for America? Not what’s best for blacks or whites — what’s best for America is justice, however long denied, and racial peace. Those can only be achieved with accountability, healing, and forgiveness. The only way there is via the truth.

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Encouragingly, this process is under way in the South and the North, the areas most implicated in slavery and Jim Crow. For about the past decade, states, along with newspapers and colleges, oddly enough, have begun to excavate their own history and connect the dots between the past and the present. Brown University, for instance, has studied its own connection to slavery through its founders’ slave-trading-based endowment. Many Southern colleges are embroiled in wars over statues and campus buildings honoring heroes of the Confederacy; indeed, several Southern states have been forced to debate the continued use of the Confederate flag and even its very meaning. Southern states such as North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Florida have conducted studies unearthing their responsibility for pogroms that destroyed entire black communities, murdered hundreds, and turned over vast black holdings to whites. The Associated Press studied a century’s worth of courthouse documents proving that lynchings were often covers for stealing black-owned land and businesses that ended up sold for pennies on the dollar to whites and corporations. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution proved that, after Reconstruction, scores of black towns were emptied by white violence, their land and capital incorporated into white land, white capital. The Hartford Courant apologized for running slave and slave-recapture ads, while a leading North Carolina paper apologized for fomenting and covering up a devastating white riot there at the turn of the twentieth century.

The legal claims may be cold, but the land and the facts are still there; now whites can no longer believe that they’re better off because they work harder. Nor can America deny the depth of its venal racial calculations. As bad as lynch mobs were, at least they could be attributed to mass hysteria; Soviet-esque state-sanctioned expropriation and redistribution to elites gives whites a disturbing new insight into their own character. In 1968, James Baldwin said, “If I am not who you say I am, then you are not who you think you are”; one of the things that drives blacks craziest is white self-congratulation when whites should know better. Without this search for the truth, no white can be sure his ancestors weren’t villains and no black can be sure his were victims.

Less definitively but equally helpfully, undertakings like the former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder’s quest to establish a national slavery museum and black South Carolinians’ efforts to honor Denmark Vesey, leader of a failed slave revolt, will also shed light on that which whites least want discussed and which blacks may well turn out to be far less proud of. Congress apologized for killing anti-lynching legislation during lynching’s heyday, and movements are brewing in several Southern states to apologize for slavery. The outcomes are irrelevant. It’s the process that will bring the healing and bring the truth closer to the surface.

As each black generation is emerging less encumbered by its racial past, so too are whites beginning to delve into their own racial inheritance. Their consciences have been pricked by books like Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, which documents a slave owner’s descendant retrieving his black relatives from the mists of history, and Cynthia Carr’s Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, in which a white woman dared to figure out if her grandfather was a Klansman involved in an infamous lynching in Marion, Indiana. Skin privilege is giving way to the unquenchable human curiosity and love of sleuthing; it’s not just blacks who need to know who they really are. We must not be disheartened by the halting pace and frequent stymieing of these quests (for instance, Tulsa’s commission found that the infamous white riot of 1921 did indeed destroy “Black Wall Street” with state sanction but decided only to strike commemorative medals as a remedy, even though some victims are still alive); the truth will out. It’s the only way we can forgive each other and each allow the other to hold his head up as an American.

White hesitancy and even indifference to this task is not our biggest problem. The problem is blacks. Too many want to dig through history looking only for ammunition to lob at whites in the vain hope of ... what exactly? An apology? Reparations? Any such inquiries, intended as anything other than a search for the truth, wherever it leads, are mere vendettas. More profoundly, there seems to be a black presumption that only whites have any dirty laundry and embarrassing secrets to sort through. But no race will emerge looking entirely innocent. Whites are appalled that insurrectionist leaders like Nat Turner, John Brown, and Denmark Vesey are now nominated by blacks for honor when they murdered (or planned to murder) “innocent” whites. But what will blacks think when they learn that nearly all slave revolts were given away by fellow slaves? And that the turncoat was your ancestor?

Some of blacks’ great-great-grandfathers aided the Confederacy, and some of their great-great-grandmothers were not rape victims but willing lovers — or they bartered their bodies for silk dresses and freedom from the fields. Some free blacks owned slaves, and many were decidedly rejectionist of their enslaved brethren; their battle was often to distinguish themselves from the slaves and fight for their own privileges on the basis of their Creole heritage or worldly circumstances. In an eerie parallel that has not been discussed outside of black academic circles, insurrectionist blacks in Colonial times (those closest to their African heritage) employed tactics discomfitingly similar to those we fear from today’s stereotypical Muslim terrorist: fire (the terror tactic from which few were safe in those times of wooden structures), the poisoning of city water supplies, and random violence against whites. Even as more and more blacks convert from Christianity to an Islam they see as African, few seem to know that enslaved Muslims felt little kinship with their enslaved brethren and largely despised their non-Muslim fellow captives; they often identified with the whites’ superiority, a division encouraged by whites.

So the question is not Will whites ever face the truth? but Can blacks handle the truth? The answer had better be yes, because America’s future depends on it.

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Debra J. Dickerson is the author of An American Story and The End of Blackness. She has been a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, the national correspondent for Salon, and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Her essay “Who Shot Johnny” in The New Republic was included in The Best American Essays 1997. Ms. Dickerson received a J.D. from Harvard University and spent twelve years on active duty in the United States Air Force.