Forgive And Forget?
AN INJUSTICE UNRESOLVED AND UNFORGIVEN BURNS A hole in the heart. Although an apology cannot erase the wound, it can serve as a balm. It can "help to heal," says Fred Gray, the attorney for the survivors of the Tuskegee (Ala.) experiment--a study in official turpitude that (from 1952 to 1972) saw the U.S. government perpetrating medical malpractice in the name of syphilis research on African-Americans.
President Clinton's decision, announced last week, to apologize to the Tuskegee victims is somewhat anticlimactic, for shortly after the experiment was exposed in 1972 a $10 million package of financial reparation was negotiated. Nonetheless, a show of presidential "penance," said Gray, will finally allow his clients (only eight of the $99 surreptitiously denied treatment are still alive) the peace of mind they deserve.
Gray's talk of apology and penance raises profound questions: Is acknowledging an awful truth a prelude to getting beyond it? Can an apology made in the service of politics lead to reconciliation? Or is it better simply to ignore the past and focus on the present?
South Africa is betting that the answer to the last question is no. For the past year. much of that country has avidly followed hearings conducted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body empowered to offer amnesty--in exchange for truth to those who committed atrocities on behalf of the state. At a conference in Atlanta convened earlier this month by the Southern Education Foundation, commission vice chair Alex Boraine made clear that he was under no illusion that the search for truth alone will free his nation from its past. But it is, he argued, a necessary step. "We haven't really accepted just how bad it is... the deceit, lies, the cover-ups, on which the South African society has been built," he observed. Truth was "the beginning of healing."
Exposing the truth, however, is very different from ensuring that people face it. Brigalia Bam, head of the South African Council of Churches, observed that many of the white English-speaking clergy have essentially boycotted the reconciliation process. Since they were not directly implicated in the evils of apartheid, the ministers see themselves as effectively blameless. By the same token, many of those confessing wrongdoing were not also accepting blame. How much good, she wondered, can come from confessions without remorse, from truth without compassion? Such questions yield no easy answers. Nonetheless, Boraine insisted on the value of what he is doing, citing the fact that a number of families had expressed gratitude to his commission for ferreting out the facts concerning loved ones-even if they had serious reservations about granting amnesty to murderers.
No doubt--for victimized and victimizer alike-the process of facing awful truths can sometimes lead to catharsis, perhaps even, for the wrongdoer, a renewed sense of purpose. That was certainly suggested by Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary last year, when she announced a $4.8 million financial settlement for the families of U.S. citizens secretly injected with radiation during the cold war. She pronounced herself "grateful to these families for the tough lessons they have taught us about trust, responsibility and accountability." Attorney General Richard Thornburgh expressed similar appreciation in 1988 to the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. As the government agreed to cough up $1.25 billion in compensation, Thornburgh declared, "In forcing us to re-examine our history, you have made us only stronger and more proud." If facing a shameful past can lead to a better present, argues John Powell, then America ought to erect a monument commemorating slavery and its aftermath. Powell, director of the University of Minnesota's Institute on Race and Poverty, believes that a memorial with slavery as its focus (in contrast to an institution with a broader agenda, such as the newly opened Museum of African-American History in Detroit) might serve a function similar to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. It would "create space for a national discussion about the lack of a level playing field, and why we remain a nation divided."
There is a universal quality to the search for a resolution to past wrongs. The Japanese government acknowledged as much last year by apologizing to the "comfort women," who were forced to perform sex with Japanese troops during World War II. Yet, even as the government apologized, many in Japan insisted that the women were at least partly complicit. It is not altogether unlike what is going on in South Africa, where gruesome facts are admitted but responsibility is not truly accepted; or even in Tuskegee, when the reality of an ignoble history is acknowledged, but the evil itself largely dismissed as the iniquity of a less enlightened past.
Desirable as it may be to face the ugliness of the past, we inevitably bring to the task the baggage of the present, ensuring, among other things, that even if we acknowledge it we don't necessarily connect it to our times, and certainly not to ourselves. Nonetheless, there is value in formally owning up to evil. For one thing, as Gray and Boraine point out, the ritual provides some comfort for the victims and their descendants. Also, it serves as a reminder that, even in a world of relative morality, we imperil the noblest part of our humanity whenever we shirk our responsibility to sort out fight from wrong.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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