{"id":34976,"date":"2017-10-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-16T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/34976-is-the-united-states-ready-for-a-truth-telling-process.html"},"modified":"2017-10-17T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T22:00:00","slug":"is-the-united-states-ready-for-a-truth-telling-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/en\/34976-is-the-united-states-ready-for-a-truth-telling-process.html","title":{"rendered":"Is the United States Ready for a Truth-Telling Process?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fania Davis thinks the time has come for a truth-telling process about racial injustice in the United States. A noted activist and the founding director of\u00a0Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY)<\/a>, Davis has confronted systematic racism for decades, working from Birmingham, Alabama to the Bay Area and beyond. But she noticed renewed grassroots momentum to explore the legacy of slavery in the aftermath a white police officer\u00a0killing Michael Brown<\/a>, a black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri three years ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI see Ferguson as kind of a marker,\u201d she said at a\u00a0conference at Kean University<\/a>\u00a0this summer. \u201cWe have seen this bubbling up of truth-telling since Ferguson, and it was those young people who stayed in the street, who refused to leave, that created this sea change.\u201d<\/td>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/td>\n
Jodie Geddes and Fania Davis<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Brown\u2019s death catalyzed local conversations not just in Missouri, but across the country. Now, Davis wants to build on those discussions and facilitate a national truth-telling process that places community-level dialogue at its heart. To lay the groundwork for a cohesive national process, Davis and her team at RJOY are mapping truth-telling initiatives across the US and building a network of activists. ICTJ\u2019s Sam McCann sat down with Davis and her colleague at RJOY, Jodie Geddes, to discuss their vision for a national process, what they hope it would achieve, and what they have learned from their conversations with local leaders so far.<\/p>\n

How would a grassroots truth commission in the United States fit into the current dialogue about racial justice? Can it shed a light on the historical legacy of racial violence?<\/h3>\n

Fania Davis<\/strong>: Well I think that the narrative of the US as a post-racial society has been challenged by the\u00a0Black Lives Matter<\/a>\u00a0movement particularly. And of course that began largely with Ferguson. As a direct result of those young activists\u2019 persistence, their staying out there until the whole world listened, today whenever a police killing happens, we are going to know about it around the world. There\u2019s going to be international publicity today. And the consciousness around mass incarceration has also complexified that narrative of racial progress. With the movement against mass incarceration that started before the turn of the century and advanced with Michelle Alexander\u2019s book and after that with the movie,\u00a013th<\/em><\/a>, a popular critical consciousness about\u00a0mass incarceration<\/a>\u00a0has emerged in this country.<\/p>\n

These movements have started to fill in the gaps around truth-telling, but we still need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We do not need it to function the exact same way as truth commissions in places like South Africa, where victims had never previously been able to tell their stories publicly. In the United States, these stories are increasingly becoming known. What we do need, though, is a commission to deepen and shine a light on all the truth telling and\u00a0racial healing<\/a>\u00a0work that is going on. We need a Truth and Reconciliation process to bring together all of these disparate initiatives to coalesce in a more coordinated process that will result not only in truth-telling, but also in racial healing and transformative reparation.<\/p>\n

Jodie Geddes<\/strong>: A huge part of the work that we\u2019re doing right now is a mapping initiative of groups addressing historical harms, particularly those against African-Americans. And so right now, we\u2019re documenting where these initiatives are happening and what we really found so far is that we\u2019re not just talking about organizations, but we are also talking about individuals that are lifting up the truth, whether it is in their classrooms or whether it is in their local community as organizers.<\/p>\n

What are you learning from this mapping work?<\/h3>\n

Jodie:<\/strong>\u00a0From documentation, we are seeing that people are heavily engaged in memorialization. And a lot of people are talking about Equal Justice Initiative\u2019s historical marker and lynching memorialization efforts, but there are other people who are going back to the sites of historic harms on a local level and bringing the descendants of those who were enslaved to the same table as descendants of slave-owners. We are finding all of these initiatives happening on a community level, so our question now is: how do we connect these groups, pool resources, and build capacity?<\/p>\n

We are looking to create an electronic data map that helps document some of the truths these local groups are exposing and helps connect them with each other. These maps are a way for people to build deeper relationships with each other. It also allows us to begin to think about oral histories in a different way. We often rely on newspapers, textbooks, other \u201cgatekeepers of knowledge.\u201d But who are the people in communities that are the gatekeepers of knowledge and have the stories, and how do we allow for those stories to be shared?<\/p>\n

Fania:<\/strong>\u00a0Every day I learn about some new truth-telling or racial healing initiative. Not nearly enough people in the U.S. know about this amazing and hopeful work. The first thing we want to do as Jodie explained is to lift up and begin to make this work visible nationally through the mapping and networking process. Our project is intended to network these disparate initiatives, now kind of siloed, that are bubbling up all over the country so that they might become aware of themselves as part of a broader national movement; for example, the Black Women\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Bridging the Divide (between Chicago police and communities they serve), Universities Studying Slavery, the work at Georgetown, Harvard and Brown Universities, Ferguson\u2019s Truth-Telling Project, Northeastern University Law School\u2019s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Institute, Coming to the Table, Equal Justice Initiative, Richmond\u2019s Initiatives of Change, the Kellogg Foundation\u2019s Truth, Racial Healing, Transformation Enterprise, The Mass Slavery Apology, the emergence of slavery and lynching museums and so many others.<\/p>\n

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