“Truth, Reconciliation, and Education”: Healing the Original Sin of Slavery by Sonya McCoy-Wilson, Ed.D. Executive Coach McCoy Wilson Consulting, LLC
The United States has found itself incapable of escaping the original sin of slavery. A full 156 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, we find vestiges of slavery in every U.S. system and every social and political movement since the U.S. Civil War. The once-titled “dark and peculiar institution” is indeed the dark underbelly of every governmental, educational, and social policy from the U.S. Constitution and its 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, to landmark Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 and the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction South to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, as well as the eight Civil Rights Acts (and restoration of those acts) between 1957 and 2021. Indeed, America has a dark past as well as a dark present. Yes, the conceptualization of Americanism is a beautiful dream—for some. However, for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities, the Americanism and the “American dream” have been largely relegated to whites. Various measures have been attempted with the aim of transforming the United States into the democratic republic that it set out to be. None of these measures—the Civil War, Reconstruction, copious amendments to the Constitution, civil rights acts, affirmative action—have truly been successful. These measures have ideologically failed because the entire nation has not been invested in dismantling the system that birthed a slave colony and eventually a democratic republic. That system is deeply rooted in the ideology of “the white plantocracy.” That system is predicated on eugenics. That system is white supremacy itself. I argue here that the best way to dismantle white supremacy is through education and re-education. Truth, reconciliation, and education are the best hope we have for moving the country forward into authentic equity and inclusion. This essay posits truth, reconciliation, and education as the best model by which to transcend America’s dark past. Truth When one imagines truth and reconciliation, one naturally envisions South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its emphasis on restorative justice (Tutu, 2019). According to Tutu (2019), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a “court-like body 135
