Dark Hearts and Wounded Knees

Christians seek West's atonement for colonialism today. This kind of thing makes me hopeful, then immediately wary. I know there's something dark under the surface here. I'm at once inspired, skeptical, daunted, and wondering what the "backlash" will be. Or maybe the darkness is my own heart, asking whether this is really my problem, and wondering if we can't just forget about it.

But these guys sound upbeat: "We are not looking to man for help, we are looking to God for our dignity to be restored but first of all the West must confess, repent and atone for their past . . . Once that happens we can talk of reparations and co-operation and how we can start on an equal footing."

It's a start. Apologies are scary. They're usually encumbered by small print so they can't be admitted into evidence as legal admissions. Unhindered, public apologies are unusual, and make headline news. The descendants of L. Frank Baum (Wizard of Oz), for example, recently made headlines for apologizing for Baum's racism against Native Americans. And by "racism," I mean "called for extermination." Or as Baum put it: "Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth." A position that was egregious even on the 19th century frontier, as explained by Tony L. Kollman. This isn't the folksy racism of Mark Twain, and calling it out can't be dismissed as political correctness. This was express incitement to genocide; and Wounded Knee, which followed, was genocide.

So this summer, Baum's descendants visited Wounded Knee descendents and apologized. His great-great-grandson, Mac Hudson, described it as "a very humbling experience," and noted that "It seemed possible that healing could occur from this." .

Possible. There's some hope.

If apologizing is hard, what's the next step? Making amends is even harder. Reparations -- repairing that which was broken -- attempt both social reconciliation and legal restitution. Perhaps they make the most sense from an "unjust enrichment" theory -- but we tend to get hung up on the emotional issues of guilt, culpability, and vindictation. As Salim Muwaakil wrote about slavery reparations, they have the potential to "help clarify the crippling affects of that legacy by taking careful account of the structural and intergenerational dimensions of racial advantage and disadvantage. This approach is not concerned with inducing guilt or moral suasion; it defines slavery in terms of unjust enrichment and racially biased distribution of resources."

Okay, but do we have to do something about it? I was lucky to study Human Rights with Professor Wiktor Osiatynski, a Polish Constitutional scholar. What I remember about Professor Osiatynski is his admiration for the U.S. and our Constitution. His appreciation, from a critical and global perspective, was refreshing. (My own stagnant appreciation was pretty much summed up in my 8th Grade VFW-Contest winning essay entitled, "The Constitution, Our License to Liberty.") Professor Osiatynski gave the U.S. its due credit as a stable and successful young democracy (which, I gathered, has been a hard thing to create from scratch in post-Communist Poland). But he was equally open about America's debits: that we built our country on a history of slavery and Native displacement. This gave the young U.S. tremendous economic leverage and the geography of a "clean slate" compared to old countries like Poland. And this is a legacy we haven't reconciled. So there it was. The cloud in the room, darkening my gloating rights over Poland and her flailing Constitution. The same darkness I feel today -- it apparently stretches from South Dakota to Africa, all the way across Oz and beyond.

Reparations are complex. I don't know how we'd start considering who has been "unjustly enriched" by slavery and genocide, and to whom amends must be made. Or maybe I'm just making excuses -- and this is that darkness in my heart saying it's too little, too late, and it's time to move on. Because I sound pretty close to Mr. L. Frank Baum: we've come this far, wouldn't a few more wrongs make it all go away?

Our democracy gives us hope and (at risk of sounding like an 8th grader) it gives us responsibility. Where to begin?