Race, Memory, and Historical Responsibility: What Do Southerners Do with a Difficult Past? (original) (raw)

2012, Catalyst a Social Justice Forum

Newly emerging, transitional societies-that is, societies that traded dictatorial or authoritarian rule for some form of open or liberal polity-face at least three interdependent problems of what is called in legal scholarship and social science "transitional justice." The first is how, if at all, to hold the old regime's autocratic, often violence-laden leadership responsible for its wrongdoings while in power. The second is what, if anything, to do with thousands upon thousands of ordinary folk whose participation in, or compliance with, the old regime helped legitimate and thus perpetuate the wrongdoing. The third task is how, if at all, to deal with the victims of the old regime. By situating the American South in the global context of the need of newly democratizing societies for transitional justice, we explore how the South's similarities with and differences from other such societies have shaped the timing and character of its peoples' post-Jim Crow era restorative justice and racial reconciliation projects, paying particular attention to criminal trials for perpetrators of past crimes, apology, truth and reconciliationtype commissions, and memorialization. We then document the extent of racial inequalities in employment, income, poverty status, and morbidity and mortality, arguing both that past racial injustices result in contemporary racial inequalities and that restorative justice points forward in time as well as backward. The "Long Shadow" of the Past In his novel Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner (1951) used one of his characters, Gavin Stevens, to observe that "the past is never dead, it is not even past." The force of that observation has contrary implications for the present. Often, for example, the past is coated with nostalgia's soothing patina-Jimmy Carter's touching memoir of growing up in Depression-era Georgia, An Hour Before Daybreak (2001) is a case in point-and thus help us cope with, or escape from, the burdens of the present. On the other hand, some recollections, those of past historical injustices, in particular, are anything but soothing, and they are especially likely, in the words of the philosopher Janna Thompson (2004, p. vii), to "cast a long shadow." This shadow is one imbued with memories of pain, loss, criminality and victimhood, a shadow signifying how that "difficult" past, which stretches back decades or even centuries, persists into the present. Just as those long shadows of the past may today license evil,