New College Alumna Sofia Ali-Khan on Racism and Reconciliation
Published in Sarasota Magazine, November 3, 2022
You can’t reconcile what you don’t see as a problem. When my kids were in pre-school, they learned the four steps of apology: This is what I did wrong; I’m not going to do it again; tell me how I can make it up to you; and I’m sorry.
There are several steps that need to happen before you get to ‘sorry’ for reconciliation to work. I often get pushback for discussing the history of America’s color lines; I frequently get asked what I would say to the argument that these things are the distant past. One of the things I do in A Good Country is link current issues or persistent color lines to the histories I tell.
Closing the door on the past or minimizing what’s happened is not how reconciliation works. There needs to be an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, an affirmation of the humanity of the person wronged, and real reparation of harm. We’ve not yet effectively taken the first step of implementing a public education curriculum that honestly tells the story of our country’s foundation. We don’t describe it as a settler colonial project or say that much of our infrastructure, including cleared land and many of our railways, were the work product of enslaved Africans. We’ve never had a national conversation about what reparation for the devastation of Black and Native people would mean.
Of course, those conversations are happening, they just aren’t being widely acknowledged by power brokers….”
