Why Truth Telling, Racial Healing, and Reparations? Because since the Ferguson protest in 2014 that birthed the youth-driven and historic #Black Lives Matter movement, sparking a national conversation on RACE and a huge cry for justice that ended the national complacency that pinned our hopes on a criminal justice system, that rarely indicts police officers or convicts them. It became clear that the problem isn’t just “a few bad apples” but an intensely punitive and racialized justice system that continues centuries of unhealed racial traumas reaching all the way back to the birth of this nation. The trauma has morphed from slavery to sharecropping and lynching. We progressed from that to Jim Crow and then convict leasing. More recently its expressed as mass incarceration and deadly police practices. This system, our system, lacks the capacity to redress these racialized historical harms. Until this nation interrupts the intergenerationally-transmitted racial traumas, we are doomed to perpetually re-enact them. How do we interrupt these cycles? One way is becoming RESTORATIVE JUSTICE-BASED, conducting TRUTH-TELLING convenings, and actively tackling RACIAL HEALING and, finally, accepting and engaging in REPARATIONS for this country’s biggest sin.
In the coming months RJOY is looking to display maps and graph that identify and track Truth-Telling, Racial Healing and Reparations projects. We look forward to organizing a national convening of those involved in the work. We will develop a short film and a publication highlighting existing initiatives and become guides for new projects. Here are EXAMPLES of U.S. Truth-Telling, Racial Healing, and Reparations Initiatives:
- Equal Justice Initiatives’ Lynching and Slavery Museum and Memorialization Projects
- Coming To The Table
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Initiative
- The Greensboro, NC Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- Universities Studying Slavery
- Northeastern Law Schools’ Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project
If you are doing something or plan on doing something drop us a note on our Contact Us page and we will include you on upcoming interactive MAPs!