There are two concepts that fight for our constancy to describe moments in time when peoples of the Black and white races would come together in comity and goodwill: racial healing and reconciliation. While most authors today tend to write them as though one is a synonym for the other, I much prefer to think that they can and should not function this way.
Why is it important to make distinctions between the two? Words do matter, for they set in place and motion our expectations and reasoning. For example, while technically not a present participle, the phrase, racial healing, connotes a continuing process, not static nor complete. At the same time, reconciliation, with its declarative finality, suggests something that is quite different, where something like a story ends with a stout period. I have used reconciliation frequently when discussing racism and related topics, but I have now come to realize its shortcomings as a conceptual synonym for racial healing. For example, based on the South African experience with the use of it, which I will discuss momentarily, I have concluded that we should use something else than reconciliation – some other word, some other conceptual framework that is more appropriate, powerful, energetic, and emergent. We should leave reconciliation alone except for very specific circumstances and take a turn in our vocabulary away from reconciliation being synonymous with racial healing.
Over the years, much attention has been given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC), created during the administration of Nelson Mandela. Implicit in the idea of reconciliation is the reaching of some agreement or conciliation or an agreement to disagree. In South Africa’s case, judged from an historical perspective, the ultimate determinations of the TRC did not produce any meaningful agreement or consensus. In the fourth edition of A History of South Africa, authored primarily by Yale Professor Dr. Leonard Thompson, one of the foremost experts on South Africa, the following comments about the TRC are made:
“But the TRC did not advance the cause of racial reconciliation. Indeed, in the short run it had the opposite effect, accentuating the racial divisions in South African society. Nor did the TRC bring justice to the victims of political violence. Many killers and torturers walked free for talking about their crimes, and victims received little compensation from the reparation committee. Notwithstanding the noble efforts of many South Africans, including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, race continued to be the basic line of division in South African society. . .”
One could clearly make a strong argument that there was much more truth than reconciliation in the outcome of the TRC. Of course, significant public disclosures occurred about various atrocities that had happened in South Africa over the years with particular emphasis on the white government’s brutalities, many of which had happened suspiciously and surreptitiously against Blacks. However, it should be noted that several leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) were found by the TRC to have also committed serious crimes. The ANC has been the principal governing party of South Africa since 1994, but it was outlawed by the white South African government for some three decades until only a few years before Nelson Mandela, former president of the ANC, was elected to head South Africa’s multi-racial and multi-ethnic government in 1994. The truth evolved out of the TRC in ways that were not fully contemplated and that bore not much reconciliation of note.
The point should be made that reconciliation can better serve a purpose, not as a parallel and synonymous tool alongside racial healing for racial comity, but as an agent for achieving an agreement between two, roughly equal parties. In fact, there are good reasons to subscribe to the proposition that reconciliation should not even be attempted unless the two parties possess basically equivalent or near equivalent power and persuasion. If the latter be true, then the wording for the title of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established for South Africa in 1995 had been incorrectly applied, for the parties involved in the pursuit of “reconciliation” had not become, in any meaningful sense, equal in power and standing. Whites had been in charge of South Africa for generations, while Blacks received political and racial power only in the 1990s, at which point Blacks could then testify about their historical absence of prior political and governmental authority and meaningful influence.
So, what lesson do we learn from the South African experience? I think one conclusion we can reach is that we should expect more success in racial relations by following the protocol that’s outlined for racial healing through authentic passion, which gives us a chance at personal, one-to-one interaction. We surely should expect more by adhering to that course than by trying to institutionalize the quest for reconciliation, which has been attempted for several decades in the United States with disappointing results. Certainly, the pursuit of racial healing will require more work by more people with goodwill and much individual initiative to break down barriers of hundreds of years.
At the same time, reconciliation may have seemed to many then precisely the right word to use in the South Africa setting for the perpetrators and recipients of the long-term aggression were or had been occupants of completely separate worlds, and the promise of reconciliation through formality to cross the abyss that separated the two distant worlds between Black and white South Africans must have relied on the yearning from both groups for some possible racial comity. While there may have been a desire for a prospective connection between the two groups, a primary purpose for the TRC had been recognition of prior bad behavior of whites that had pressed their domination and artificial authority upon Blacks. Thus, a central purpose that the Commission was attempting to achieve consisted of recognition by both parties of what had actually happened between Blacks and whites, so that a new country, a new nation could then move forward.
The South African experience does not, in any realistic fashion, relate to the story of allyship that developed between Sheila Walker and me. It was possible we could have pursued a South African model of recognition and acknowledgment of the circumstances that transpired with our forebears in October, 1919 in the Elaine Race Massacre. With awareness of our history, Sheila and I could have met the criteria of reconciliation, but we wished for more and pursued something quite different. To our way of thinking and belief, the reconciliation route did not reflect our goals; we wanted our relationship to have more fundamental connections that employed authentic passion and a relationship that contained understanding, empathy, healing, love, and co-inherence, something well beyond the concept of reconciliation as I have referenced it in the context of the South African experience. I believe Sheila and I achieved our wish.
All of this description leads me to underscore the distinction between racial reconciliation and racial healing, as applicable to the proposed protocol, contained in these installments of “For Racial Healing”. While not everyone could arrive at this point, it is my belief that racial healing and allyship are the best path for Americans to pursue, which can be enduring and contagious. Even though Sheila died in 2021, my wife and I still remain close to Ivor, Sheila’s husband, talking every few days, remembering birthdays, speaking candidly about our beliefs, and expressing our feelings for each other as continuing love – and it is love. It is also racial healing.
Of course, there are individuals, both Black and white, who desire relationships between Blacks and whites to be tolerant and just, but who do not fully trust the idea of pursuing allyship or love or even considerable friendship between Blacks and whites. These individuals simply choose racial relationships that produce equivalent tolerance and justice from both sides. In this respect, they have indicated that they wish to have equivalent rights and freedoms, but to them, allyship, authentic passion, and love between Blacks and whites are not actually attainable. These individuals are much more comfortable viewing a future with the same rights and privileges that align without the obligation, urgency, and expectation to seek for more than those assurances and realities. With Black-white history being what it has been in this country, it is, for these individuals, neither prudent nor probable to pursue racial healing prospects or protocol.
Certainly, there are analogues among Blacks and whites who identify with this separative position. The analogue to those Blacks who stay away from whites consists of those whites who stay away from Blacks at virtually any cost, and at a human cost that daily lessens the value of us all. It is unfortunate that they can only look forward to mostly minimal relations between Black and white individuals and communities. Beyond the individual attainment of correcting the course of our lives, allyships provide insurance and protection for the future. To the extent allyships develop, we – Blacks and whites – will have an insulation against the onslaught and rapidity that unexpected racism can launch. A variety of forms associated with racism has a way of reappearing visibly and unexpectedly.
Racial healing is what it says – a healing, not a reconciliation, which can be interpreted as a temporary dressing over a single or a series of single incidents. Racial healing means something more enduring, something bearing a promise and a promise dared.
Next Time: The Present Tense