Iona Community, Scotland

Yesterday, Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron dealt with the frightening results of a report on the Bloody Sunday Killings in Northern Ireland by apologizing.  As I read about crowds celebrating the release of the report and Cameron’s statement, strings of comments commending him for his sincerity, and two books about a different public figure, the Salem witch judge from my last post, I feel awe at the difference simple, honest apologies can make in history.

Now, my dad’s in the public relations business.  For many years our lights were kept on by the tricky mechanisms by which companies and governments control their images.  That’s why I’m taken aback at how candid, how easy, and how effective Cameron’s statement seemed yesterday.  You very rarely hear anybody be as honest as to say “what happened should never, ever have happened”, but he did. He continued, “And for that, on behalf of the government — and indeed our country — I am deeply sorry.”  You don’t hear it often because it’s really hard to do.

We live in a world of tough justice and rampant suing, all of which will probably happen now because of the report that British killings of 17 protesters in Derry were unjustified.  But first Cameron’s apology allowed for a moment of rare emotional catharsis for Britain and I think that’s important.  The results didn’t get buried in a behemoth of cover-ups and vague answers, which would have made the unbearable 12 years it took for the report to complete an even larger band aid to pull off.  I am reminded of how difficult it is to begin processes of reconciliation, how very resistant people as well as governments are to admitting they were wrong after war, after genocide, after discrimination.  When bad things happen in relationships, in families, when mistakes happen or feelings are deeply hurt, it can feel nearly impossible to apologize like you mean it.

Richard Francis, author of Judge Sewall’s Apology obviously became very close to his research about the man who confessed in Old South Church that the 20 executions in the Salem witch trials were simply wrong.  He writes eloquently about the effect of Sewall’s apology in his introduction:

“For all of us, it’s difficult to say we’re sorry.  An apology means repudiating an aspect of our past selves; in that way, it’s a little like suicide.  And those in public life find it almost impossible ever to admit they have made mistakes and errors of judgment.  They fear doing so will suggest weakness and unreliability, a poor capacity for decision making, ultimately a fatal crack in the facade of leadership…But there is another way of looking at it.  Apology can be a creative act.  It can liberate both an individual and his or her society.  Apology frees you from the past and gives you access to the future.”

Judge Sewall’s Apology Richard Francis, HarperCollins 2005

I feel struck by Francis’s description of apology as “creative”, in the sense of it’s ability to give people, governments, or businesses the ability to create new bridges after others have been burned.  Often times to say we’re sorry is the only thing will save us, or anybody else.  But only if we act on it too.

I was at the helm of the Bi-College News this semester, so I decided to ease off on courses.  I took Latin, creative writing, and an independent study with Dave Dawson at Haverford.  My semester visiting Professor Dawson’s office with readings in hand was by far one of the best academic experiences I’ve had in college.

I went in with ambitious goals: to decode ways in which the Reformation and Enlightenment contributed to modernity and American history.  Luckily, I had a few other guiding points to narrow things down.

There was a day that haunted me in a class I had taken a year before with Tracey Hucks, Varieties of African American Religious Experience.  Among many other powerful moments in her classroom, this particular one was when Professor Hucks read from White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan’s paradigm book about the history of race in America.  The section was about English perceptions of blackness, not from during the height of the transatlantic slave trade but from before, the time leading to Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, and pilgrims en route to America.

“Long before they found that some men were black, Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their most ingrained values.  No other color except white conveyed so much emotional impact.  As described by the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of black before the sixteenth century included, ‘Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul…Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc.’…White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil.” (White Over Black, pg. 7)

For English Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and planters in the southeast, strong cultural and literary references to blackness were alive and in place so that slave-trading and slave-holding could become institutions protected by legal and political authority.  Before the Mayflower, the European mind was already subject to ideas about color that would lead to the proliferation of slavery in the New World, and for religious and scientific stories alike to justify its persistence.

In a class a year later, Blacks and Jews in America, we were talking about how on the National Mall there is an American Indian museum, the nearby Holocaust museum, a tiny African Art museum, but no African American museum.  I spoke without knowing exactly what I was going to say, stringing together conclusions I had scrawled in my notebook: “I don’t believe that white America would allow an African American museum to be located on the Mall.  Letting blacks tell their story of America would overthrow the narrative structures on which America was built and continues to exist.”

I remember the room fell silent, and overall, people looked uncomfortable and grim.  I felt uncomfortable too.  I’m white, after all.  I, and my family, have benefited from the exclusion of black Americans from this country’s story and economy since our Massachusetts Puritan ancestors to my mother’s childhood in Birmingham, Alabama.  But as someone who believes very strongly in the power of stories and public education to change politics, and also as someone who has a growing sense of religious faith, I felt it was very important that I face the truth of what I was realizing.

Moments like this have rechartered the course of my academic interests from propositions about reason and free will to the experience of being in America and the world today.  Race and inequality is something we live daily, something about our bodies as well as our minds.  They are realities that are political, economic, and as I’ve learned from reading James Cone and other liberation theologians, transcendent.

Little did we in the Blacks and Jews class know that there will indeed be an African American museum on the National Mall (or that President Bush was the one who signed it into being).  The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the newest Smithsonian museum in Washington, is scheduled to break ground in 2012 and be ready for visitors in 2015.  Check out what they’re planning.

The museum will play a huge, exciting role in exactly what I feared couldn’t happen – a significant change of course in the way we tell the American story – right on the Mall.

In my studies with Professor Dawson, one of my primary concerns was to decipher what ideals lay at the heart of the European Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the founding of America.  Which ideas actually created, rather than demolished, the categories by which people were and are excluded from the American dream? It’s not the kind of thing you can answer in a semester, or in a summer.  But I think figuring it out is important.  White Americans must be politically and culturally ready for what it means to take black American narratives seriously.  White Americans must be ready to come to terms with the assumptions in our own history that permitted slavery, Jim Crow, and that continue to allow for shocking statistics of inequality based on race.  History books need to change.  The education gap needs to change.  We must understand that giving African American history and culture the place (and funding) it deserves is central to understanding ourselves as Americans, because as the founding director of the NMAAHC Lonnie Bunch says, we are all shaped “by this story, by this culture, by this history.” And if we change the narrative, it will help change our politics.

"a lie is not a shelter" Lorna Simpson, 1989 (part of NMAAHC collection)

design for the NMAAHC