Does America Need a Truth Commission?

Source: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/. Used without permission.

The New Year offers a chance at restart for Americans and the world, along with the rollout of the coronavirus vaccines, and the impending inauguration of the avuncular president-elect Joe Biden. Besides that, though, it offers us all a chance to rest from collective trauma... rest from ten months (so far) of a deadly pandemic and the economic dislocation and social distancing it has wrought, rest from an unusually virulent election campaign whose overtime finally ends January 5 with the Georgia runoffs, and rest from a presidential term marked by relentless and aggressive public relations, alternative facts, erratic policy making, and outbursts of gratuitous cruelty and violence. 

One way that's been suggested to achieve national rest and reset is through a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A local version is underway in Iowa City, to address issues of racial justice. The nine-member commission was authorized by the City Council in June, appointed last month, and began their work before Christmas. They are charged with investigating discrimination, hosting a forum for stories of those impacted by racism, and facilitating conversations across racial lines. Commission member T'Shailyn Harrington told The Gazette: "Once you have these conversations, there's no way someone in good conscience can say instances of racial injustice don't happen in Iowa City. If there's evidence of something, there's no way you can say, 'That's fake news'" (Hermiston 2020; see also KCRG 2020). 

Priscilla B. Hayner in 2016
(Source: Independent Commission on Multilateralism. Used without permission.)

Priscilla B. Hayner, author of a major worldwide survey of truth commissions, suggests five defining features: 

A truth commission (1) is focused on past, rather than ongoing, events; (2) investigates a pattern of events that took place over a period of time; (3) engages directly and broadly with the affected population, gathering information on their experiences; (4) is a temporary body, with the aim of concluding with a final report; and (5) is officially authorized or empowered by the state under review. (Hayner 2010: 11-12)

She counted 40 truth commissions begun through 2009 (Hayner 2010: xi-xii). Hayner is a co-founder of the International Center for Transitional Justice, and has participated in quite a lot of them herself. She is, notably, more frank than sanguine in her reflections.

My interest in this topic comes from my own fatigue, as well as the strong impression that the common life that this blog celebrates has become badly torn. This interest preceded my awareness of public calls for an American truth commission, but come they have. The prolific author and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called for one in a widely-circulated Tweet in October, promising 

It would erase Trump's lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe (quoted in Brown 2020). 

The same week, Elie Mystal presented a more detailed argument in The Nation: 

We need a form of truth and reconciliation commission precisely because our normal institutions have failed.... When a plane falls out of the sky, we don't just shrug our shoulders and say, 'Gravity has consequences.' We send in a team of experts to pick through the wreckage, figure out exactly what went wrong, hold people accountable, and make recommendations for future safety (Mystal 2020). 

Similar calls came from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes. More narrowly, Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution has called for a commission to review "what went wrong" with the American government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic (Kamarck 2020).

Makeshift medical facility in North Carolina, March 2020
(North Carolina Health News. Used without permission.)

The idea is far from universally beloved. Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance called the advocates "whiny," telling FOX News: 

Instead of... moving on with the life of American democratic politics, they want to go backward and punish everybody.... [R]eally what this is saying is you are going to be punished for trying to implement your ideals and principles into the work of government (Creitz 2020). 

More objectively, Harvard professor Jill Lepore argues that a commission focused on Trump would violate the American tradition of peaceful transfers of power dating back to the election of 1800. The Trump administration should be investigated by journalists, chronicled by historians and, in some cases, tried in ordinary courts. She does support proposals to use commissions to study the coronavirus response, racial injustice, and American Indian boarding schools. More broadly, 

what the nation needs, pretty urgently, is self-reflection, not only from Republicans but also from establishment Democrats and progressives and liberals and journalists and educators and activists and social media companies and, honestly, everyone (Lepore 2020).

Moreover, the record of past truth commissions is mixed. South Africa's famous post-apartheid truth commission allowed victims of violence to speak before the nation, but ignored broader impacts of the apartheid system. Commissions' capacity to accomplish nationwide reconciliation is vastly overstated (Zvogbo and Crawford 2020). Even the most successful commissions fall short of their ideal goals: A South African statement-taker told Hayner Perhaps sixty percent feel better, but those people are only healed sixty percent (Hayner 2010: 150). 

Jules Bakery in Marion is the latest metro business to close.
(Source: julesbakery.com. Used without permission.)

Maybe Lepore is right, and what we really should be doing is self-reflection. But like most Americans, I think on reflection that I'm pretty cool already. Maybe what America needs is not a Truth Commission so much as an Empathy Commission to guide us toward that self-reflection. This is definitely not to settle political scores; I'll let prosecutors and creditors deal with the President. However, we can have common life only if we are inclusive enough to know something of each other's stories, and can once again see difference as a variation of "us" rather than an alien "them." We need to not merely to affirm in words each other's humanity, we need it to feel it in our guts. Off the top of my head the commission should hear testimony from: 

• Central American refugees whose children were taken from them
• immigrants who contracted COVID in detention 
• state government officials and workers who dealt with a succession of instigated attacks while also managing elections, a recession, and the coronavirus
• people of color who have faced official or unofficial violence
• peaceful protestors who met with official violence
• police officers who have dealt with protests during a pandemic
• people who have suffered looting of their property
• people who have suffered violent crime
• health care workers on the front lines against COVID
• small business owners whose livelihoods have suffered during the pandemic
• school teachers and staff
• school age children
• parents of school age children
• people who've worked through the pandemic at meatpacking plants, grocery stores, and other "essential" but low-paying, low-security, and high-exposure jobs
• religious groups whose observances have been disrupted
• elderly and disabled people whose activities and contacts have been severely curtailed

Pitfalls immediately appear. It might well seem to be trivializing the historical pervasiveness of racial injustice by wedging it in besides all these more recent problems. We are ill-advisedly deviating from Hayter's five essential features, as (1) many of these situations are ongoing, (2) the list fails to focus on a pattern of events, and (3) it fails to focus on a single affected group of people. At the same time, the J.D. Vances of the world might see the Empathy Commission as another form of "whining," while the event itself could get entitled or political in a hurry. Maybe we'll wind up recycling some more unsubstantiated but highly colorful allegations of voter fraud. 

It's also not clear Americans all want to move on, or even have an inclusive common life. Well over 40 percent of Americans continue to support Trump's performance as President, and are not likely to want to move on from whatever he represents to them. A Pew Research Center survey this fall found 77-80 percent of both Trump and Biden voters saying about the other group, "Not only do we have different priorities when it comes to politics, but we fundamentally disagree about core American values." An even larger proportion of both camps, 89-90 percent, said election of the other candidate "would lead to lasting harm to the U.S." The severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement, wrote a group of scholars in Science magazine this fall, featuring the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another--in other words, they are not just wrong they are "alien" and "iniquitous" (quoted in Edsall 2020).

Maybe my Empathy Commission could tone those feelings down a bit, but at this point how do we even get people to the table?

Redmond Park, Cedar Rapids, a public space with potential
in the Wellington Heights neighborhood

Though there are lots of reasons why it can be unpleasant (Cox 2020), we each of us need to learn how constructively to encounter difference. If that can happen, it will most likely happen at the local level, rather than via national television or social media. There's the Iowa City effort. There's Richmond, Virginia, where the National Trust for Historic Preservation is supporting an effort to transform Shockoe Bottom, once America's second-busiest slave market, into a "site of conscience"... part of the international network of such historic places that bring difficult history to light and spark public dialogue to address modern-day injustices (Nieweg 2019); first they had to undo a surface parking lot and block suburban-style development of a baseball stadium. Also in the Cavalier State, the legislature has legalized "jaywalking," a huge step in democratizing streets (Gordon 2020).

In a well-designed place, buttressing such conversations that a commission "authorized or empowered by the state" (Hayter again) are able to facilitate, people come together randomly, unintentionally, and frequently on the city's sidewalks. Good fences may make good neighbors, but we also need gaps in those fences where neighbors can meet in low-stakes encounters that build trust (Jenny 2020). Let's hear from Jane Jacobs again:

I do not mean to imply that a city's planning and design, or its types of streets and street life, can automatically overcome segregation and discrimination. Too many other kinds of effort are also required to right these injustices.

But I do mean to say that... tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors--differences that often go far deeper than differences in color--which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms. ([1961] 1993: 94-95) 

New Bo City Market courtyard, a public space amidst drive-to urbanism,
but with easy access to core neighborhoods

Of the 2021 priorities for cities in Strong Towns's end-of-year survey, some focus on physical structures, some on financial arrangements, and only some directly on people, but all involve improving proximity. Joel Dixon (zoning), Talicia Richardson (regulation), Tamika Butler (equity), and Mike McGinn (combination of all three) in particular point out that good public space involves physical design, but also an inclusive approach to who is allowed to use that space, and how they are allowed to use it.

When it comes to encountering difference, we need the conversations that a commission can facilitate, but success requires a well-designed place. 

PRINT SOURCES: 

Lee Hermiston, "'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' Gets Started," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 20 Sunday 2020, 1C, 8C

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library, [1961] 1993)