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On July 19, 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Union soldiers marched into Galveston, Texas, hailing the end of the Civil War and slavery. The day, which the newly freed people of Galveston referred to as “Juneteenth,” became a day of celebration across the state and, later, the country.
This year marks the celebration’s first anniversary as a federal holiday. But while Juneteenth recognized the fall of the institution of slavery, civil rights groups and activists say that the scars from its legacy and systemic discrimination against the African American community still require redress and recognition of harm.
However, the movement for reparations, though gaining traction, has had little success in Washington.
H.R. 40, a bill which would create a commission to analyze the “lingering negative effects” of slavery, has been introduced each congressional session since 1989. A committee voted on the bill for the first time in April 2021, recommending its progression to the House floor for consideration. But no such consideration has occurred, and the bill has since languished and is expected to die with the 117th Congress in January.
In May of 2022, a group of well-known nonprofit groups, religious organizations and others sent an open letter to President Biden urging him to make good on his promise to support a “study of reparations” through an executive order by Juneteenth, but to no avail.
Still, some communities have taken reparatory justice into their own hands. In 2020, California became the first state to successfully establish a reparations task force. In its first report, released in early June of this year, it recommended proposals such as offering housing grants and providing free tuition as a means to give redress to Black Californians. In May, an Oklahoma judge ruled that the now-centenarian victims of 1921’s Tulsa Race Massacre – which ended with the complete destruction of that city’s prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood – and their families could proceed in their lawsuit for reparations.
Still, the United States has a ways to go on the road to reconciling with its legacy of racial violence. But elsewhere, certain countries have begun to address their fraught histories. In the last few decades, South Africa and Canada have both established and carried out truth and reconciliation commissions and provided restitution for some of their oppressed citizens.
Despite the differing political landscapes, could the U.S. learn something from these movements?
To explore the question, U.S. News reached out to Neeshan Balton and Eva Jewell. Balton is the director of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, an organization committed to furthering the anti-racist mission of its namesake, an anti-apartheid activist who was incarcerated for 26 years, by promoting programs and campaigns to create a more equitable South Africa.
Jewell is a member of the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation and the research director at Canada’s Yellowhead Institute, a First Nation-led research and policy center. She co-authors an annual report on the government’s progress responding to the recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was formed to address the abusive legacy of the country’s residential schools – boarding schools for Indigenous children that were funded by the Canadian government and run by the Catholic and Anglican churches as well as the United Church of Canada.
Both had thoughts to share detailing the path each country took to confront its past and present transgressions, the consequences, and what the United States can learn as it embarks on its own journey to restorative justice. The following interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Stories From Formerly Enslaved People
Lessons from South Africa
Devised by the late South African leader Nelson Mandela as a means to overcome the legacy of apartheid – South’s Africa’s decades of institutional racial oppression under white rule – the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission transpired over eight years. More than 22,000 victims of apartheid-era racial violence testified during the commission, and their public recollections formed the basis of a series of reports that exposed the brutal realities that took place during the time.
Some time after the commission released its final report in 2003, the government paid a one-time sum of R30,000 (approximately $4,600 today) to those who had registered as victims.
U.S. News: South Africa’s commission had massive public approval at time, but despite that, did it have any major challenges?
Balton: The commission’s major challenge was that its mandate, timespan and resource base were very limited. Once it had finished its work and handed over the report, it was then concluded. I think the mistake that has been made in South Africa was [considering the TRC as] the be-all and end-all of reconciliation, rather than taking the commission as a starting point for a much longer-term reconciliation agenda, which was the major shortcoming not of the commission, but particularly of the government, most political parties, and perhaps even civil society, as they just wanted to get on with the reconstruction of the country.
U.S. News: In spite of any perceived shortcomings, has the TRC markedly improved Black and other oppressed people’s lives?
Balton: From 1994 to perhaps 2008, you had a period of significant strides in terms of provision of services, water, electricity, schools, housing to predominantly Black people in this country. It is argued that it would have been the highest rate of delivery of this time in any post-colonial country in that short space of time. But I think we then get into a period of industrial scale production in this country, which I think basically puts us on the backfoot in terms of the scale of that delivery, and a lot of that has now been undone. So that’s got very little to do with the TRC. I think it’s got to do with the politics and political environment of the country today.
[Still,] the publicly held hearings were really able to reveal the true extent of the kind of individual horrors that those victims who testified had gone through. Therefore, very few would deny the kinds of terror of living at the time. So, I think it had that kind of public and mass education impact in the early ‘90s, which would have or should have created the platform for ongoing dialogue around those issues.
U.S. News: Black Americans in the United States are seeking reparations and recognition of harm from their government for the abuses of slavery and racial violence. Though the circumstances are certainly different, what advice might you have for those engaging in that fight?
Balton: How do people themselves define reparations? And what would be the most meaningful reparations to not only deal with the issues of the past but the issues that African American people today face, which would have links to that past but would have been exacerbated in current conditions? Is it socioeconomic improvement that must be targeted for development, or the other kinds of policies?
We’ve had affirmative action policies here and there. There are attempts to reverse it. We’ve had empowerment policies here. So, I think that you need to develop the kind of broad suite of issues – a basket of reparation ideas – that people would then need to get some kind of consensus on.
In the South African context, you couldn’t divorce the idea of reparations from apartheid rule. Ultimately, it’s political power, pursuing a progressive agenda to the benefit of the majority of people that does the kind of long-term undoing of the damage of the past.
Lessons from Canada
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was born from an earlier class action lawsuit against the Canadian government and major Canadian churches for the abuses at what were called Indian residential schools, the last of which were not shuttered until the late 1990’s. The settlement mandated that the government pay a total of nearly CA$2 billion ($1.5 billion in U.S. dollars) restitution for 79,000 living survivors of the schools and form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address their abusive legacy.
From 2008 to 2015, Canada’s TRC heard the accounts of over 6,500 Indigenous people from across the country. These testimonies culminated in 94 calls to action that the commission believed could mend the harms of the past and improve the present situation of Indigenous Canadians by way of policies and funding targeting education, Indigenous children’s welfare, health and culture.
However, years later, the Canadian government has answered only some of the calls, notably by the establishment of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as well as some investments into Indigenous cultures and languages.
U.S. News: Canada’s typically pegged as a fairly liberal country, but was there any significant pushback to the commission or its calls to action, especially vis-à-vis what restitution would look like?
Jewell: Canada [the government] fought [us] every step of the way. For the most part, we’ve made all of these wins because of the horror of what happened … Canada has never moved on any of the reconciliation work on its own volition. It’s always been survivors in the schools or Indigenous folks doing the really hard work of pushing for it at the grassroots level.
U.S. News: Has the commission had a significant positive influence on the day-to-day of Indigenous people in Canada?
Jewell: Certainly not day-to-day. We’re [Indigenous communities] still on boil water advisories. There’s still a lot of poverty [and] challenges that Indigenous peoples face. Last year, after the first announcement of the child graves – there were 215 graves at the Kamloops Residential School – in the three weeks following that, we saw more action on completion of the calls to action than in the last three years.
[Some years ago,] the First Nations child welfare agency [that is, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society] made a human rights complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal saying that there is a discrepancy in how much funding Canada is giving to non-Indigenous children and how much they’re giving to Indigenous children. They’re chronically underfunding Indigenous life.
If you oppress Indigenous families, take their children away and then underfund these children, you keep perpetuating the cycle, and that’s the same cycle that was in residential schools. It’s just ongoing. There’s more children in the child welfare system than there were at the height of residential schools, so it just recycled into a different system.
So, I’ve only seen change in terms of the awareness by the Canadian public more broadly, which is sad to say, because the Canadian education system should have been doing that.
U.S. News: Black Americans in the United States are seeking reparations and recognition of harm from their government for the abuses of slavery and racial violence. Though the circumstances are certainly different, what advice might you have for those engaging in that fight?
Jewell: [It’s important to keep in mind that] there is going to be a limit to the federal government – what they’re going to set up. On the one hand, you want a federal commission to look into it [for] the resources and access that one of them provides. But there will be limits to what they will mandate because it’s not really in their best interest to reveal everything. I think the recommendations and the post-recommendation era are really important.