The Reconciliation Must Be Televised

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/arts/television/the-moment-racism-tv.html

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When someone wants to explain where the country’s been since Memorial Day, they refer to The Moment. “The Moment,” at first, seemed to name a finite period, the killing of George Floyd on May 25, and the moments his death comprised. “The Moment” then proved spongy quick, absorbing the bewildering madness of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and expanding into more protests in more corners of the planet than seemed fathomable. (The demonstrations took place during a pandemic; The Moment had swelled inside a Moment.) It appealed to people whose response to such Moments has tended to be less than vociferous — white people. White people marched and chanted. They ate tear gas and pepper spray. White people said “Black Lives Matter,” “systemic racism” and, occasionally, “reparations.”

Questions arose about what The Moment was and what should be asked of it. The Moment brought us new vision to see old wrongs and emboldened us to raze and ruin them. The Moment reversed power. Mayors stood among civilians, the police took a knee, a president had been absconded into a bunker. This Moment was the sort that Black America had been waiting for — when the woke learned to walk, when the Confederate flag ceased official operation as a security blanket, when even a beloved music trio had to concede that “Dixie” no longer becomes them.

So here we are, still in this Moment, tasked to behold the changing of names and the signaling of virtue. Waiting for meaningful legislative reform, seizing matters with civilian hands in the meantime: recasting jobs; reclaiming parks and pedestals and city streets, these local reclamations, seemingly one public space at a time. The speed of change in a country notoriously allergic to it feels like a spree, reckoning as a marathon of “Supermarket Sweep.” We know The Moment is connected to other moments yet there’s a sense in our bones that it differs from them. Who knows when such a Moment might come along again?

Before it vanishes, the centuries and conditions that produced it warrant commemoration. They warrant further confrontation, reclamation and connection. They warrant an event — broadcast across the country, over months, not days — that squares the present with the past, that explains The Moment to those who say they are, at last, awake to it. This Moment of historic holding to account, of looking inward, deserves a commensurate, totalizing event that explains what is being reckoned with, demanded and hoped for, an experience that rubs between its fingers the earth upon which all those toppled monuments had so brazenly stood. The Moment warrants a depth of conversation the United States has never had. It demands truth and reconciliation.

Other countries have undergone such commissions, tribunals and soul searching — among them, El Salvador, Rwanda, Peru, Germany, South Africa. They recount staggering atrocity — inconceivable corruption, organized oppression, genocide. Of their participants, they compel confession and vulnerability. Of their audience, they require fortitude, a pillow to wail into, a strong stomach.

This country has flirted with truth and reconciliation. Reconstruction ended in 1877, a dozen years after the end of the Civil War. It was more political action than ritual, a campaign of personhood and rights that ended when racists intimidated it out of existence. In 1968, in the wake of the racial conflagrations roiling American cities during the mid- to late 1960s, Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois presented the findings of his so-called riot commission, whose politically moderate and racially uniform makeup (two of its members were Black; there was one woman) was strategically cast for ho-hum results. What it delivered to President Lyndon B. Johnson was, instead, shockingly, comprehensively grim. The United States, the commission concluded, is a hopelessly divided nation that has locked its Black citizens in impoverishment and swallowed the key, that good white folks were out-to-lunch and therefore as culpable as the white supremacists were malignant.

The conclusions and recommendations were urgent, vast yet granular, attentive and astringent. The report deduced that, among other things, the roots of the violence demanded massive housing and police reform, a serious political and economic commitment to social programs, and higher taxes. But nothing meaningful came of it. The conclusions were too overwhelming — too indicting. Johnson seemed to take the findings personally. Plus: the money required to confront them was being spent to prolong the fight in Vietnam. So white America went the opposite direction, electing Richard Nixon, who ran, in part, on a law-and-order campaign. The wound festered.

When it was published as a book early in ’68, the report became a best seller. But it ought to have been part of a one-two punch. Part two should have been a televised, multipart presentation of the commission’s intensive effort: its conclusions, considerable field work and still-bracing historical contextualizing put before the public, alongside the disgruntled, despondent, enraged, hurt Black Americans whose circumstances swell the report. The country watched the cities burn but never met the human beings who lived in them. It didn’t spend days on end hearing Kerner and especially, perhaps, John V. Lindsay, the mayor of New York and the commission’s most popular member, inveighing against the racism in our marrow. Johnson and Nixon were essentially able to look the other way.

The nation had become consumed with news of the war. But there was evident hunger to know more about the terrors at home. Nine years after the Kerner Report, a century after Reconstruction’s abandonment, we got “Roots” — eight nights of generational magnum opus meant to inspire as much as explain. It was far from the Kerner Report, set in Gambia and the antebellum South, during the Civil War and its aftermath.

ABC aired “Roots” on consecutive nights as a hedge; the network, home of “Happy Days,” had expected a dud, despite the Alex Haley novel it was based on being a huge hit. The year before, during the bicentennial, NBC had a ratings smash with the network-television debut of “Gone With the Wind.” “Roots” wasn’t perfumed with nostalgia. It was, for 1977, a watershed retrospective, in which a Black family were the heroes, and the dads from some of America’s favorite shows — “The Brady Bunch,” “The Waltons,” “Bonanza” — played racists. Scores of millions of people beheld its 12 or so hours; the finale on ABC remains the third highest-rated television episode ever. Which is to say that we once were ready to go through something ugly together as a nation.

Neither the times nor the climes are, of course, what they were in ’77. For one thing, most of the country watched that series because there wasn’t much else on. A truth and reconciliation event in 2020 would help make up for 150 years of missed opportunities. It should be broadcast live and streamed the way impeachments and inaugurations are; the way certain trials are. That would require more than just ABC’s audacity, however backhanded. It would need CBS’s, NBC’s and Fox’s; CNN’s, BET’s and the Weather Channel’s. It would demand the platforms of Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Hulu and Amazon. There would be no escaping this thing, since there is no escape in the daily lives of many Americans. We’ve marched for systemic reform. This event — some of it recorded, some broadcast live — would tell the horror story of the system, draw straight lines from slavery to right now and demand the system be reformed.

In South Africa, in 1996, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission arose from an agreement to grant amnesty to those who confessed to crimes against humanity committed during more than four decades of Apartheid. The commission took statements from 22,000 victims and witnesses; thousands of people applied for amnesty; and a kind of extralegal trial ensued in which the perpetrators faced their victims.

Some of the hearings were broadcast on Sundays for two years in hourlong episodes and some, on very few occasions, were live. Initially, the government resisted televising them at all but relented to international pressure. Deborah Hoffman and Frances Reid made a haunting documentary of the proceedings, focused on a few cases. Released in 2000, it’s called “Long Night’s Journey Into Day”; and in it, you can see why such an event would be difficult for live production. The hearings were unpredictable and thorny. Not everyone looking for amnesty was necessarily contrite. Racial exorcism proved elusive.

What would an American version be? Court, theater, a hearing, a telethon, therapy, TV, church, Ken Burns, Anna Deavere Smith? Each perhaps — and more. Who would make it? I don’t know. It could certainly proceed in conjunction with the minds and imaginations of the staff within the Smithsonian brain trust and Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. Who has been keeping C-SPAN going all these many decades? The production, however, is merely the second hurdle to clear. The first would be convincing executives that it’s worth doing in the first place. Here’s what to say about that: The entertainment industry itself has more than a century of harm to atone for and ameliorate. Any company that believes the solution to “systemic racism” is “The Help” shouldn’t mind a surrender of its airwaves.

Should this event be night after night of that scene in “Hidden Figures” in which Taraji P. Henson unloads on a giant room full of white men, including Kevin Costner, that she’s always late because her colored bathroom is a mile away from her desk? No. This wouldn’t be an exercise in rage, self-pity or despair, not purely, although the terrain will, by necessity, be despairing. It wouldn’t be a series of “white fragility” lectures, either. What’s needed is a broadcast that could include white Americans awakening to racism but remains focused on the legacies of the racism itself. There might be some of the emotional individual confrontation that put so many South Africans through the wringer. The American version would dare to hold the country to account and atone.

Would that then mean the duty for reconciliation resides with the government? Would the commission just be Congress? I hope not — it should entail more than elected officials. A mandate for the event would come as much from the public as from Washington. The power of Kerner’s outfit was that it went out and heard people.

There’s a blueprint for what I’m proposing, and it’s basically sitting in a vault. House Bill H.R. 40, as it’s now called, was originally introduced by John Conyers in 1989. He brought it up repeatedly until he left Congress in 2017. The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans currently rests in the hands of Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. What Conyers, who died in 2019, was asking the bill to do seems perfectly reasonable — “address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery.”

Why not start with that? The bill is simply calling for a conversation about reparations. It doesn’t demand a dollar be paid and only insinuates that money is owed. Instead, it simply wants members of Congress to talk about what it would mean for the United States government to close a wealth gap that it opened and, over centuries, widened until inequality among the races appears irreconcilable. If Congress refuses to take it up, Hollywood should adapt it.

The white people who bought, owned, traded, lashed and raped Black people are long dead. Their descendants are among us. Slavery, however, wouldn’t be the subject of this televised reckoning. Racism would. A crucial chunk of a truth and reconciliation broadcast would use the work of scholars and thinkers like Matthew Desmond, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Isabel Wilkerson and Richard Rothstein to enumerate the means by which the country has prospered from the theft of land and the strategic denial of housing.

It’s both a logical framing and a literary one. A home is a transferable asset. It is a refuge, a nest, a beacon of welcome, a source of dignity — the most basic of needs, and for many people over many too many decades, outrageously elusive. “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget,” the Kerner Report concluded back in 1968, “is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

Weeks could be spent covering housing with, among other things, a series of documentaries that highlight the many government and government-backed programs designed to strengthen segregation and bolster so-called ghettos. You could spend an entire night with the story of Clyde Ross, the Chicago laborer who wound up as a housing rights activist and whose travails Coates built his argument around in “The Case for Reparations.”

Weeks more could be spent on law enforcement, telling the story of America’s police force, its roots in enslavement and how racism now seems so inextricable from policing that calls for its abolition have migrated from the ideological fringes. Enough police officers, lawyers, families of the dead, legal scholars and people who are currently and formerly incarcerated could testify to racism’s criminal-justice puppetry. The same goes for the ways in which nonwhite people are far likelier to live amid pollution than white Americans; and the deep, unbreakable hypocrisies that continue to keep Black children learning separately and in substandard conditions.

There must be room for the testimony of young Black people whom nobody’s heard of, folks whose hopelessness and alienation, whose fragile personal ambitions and self-belief, can be traced from here back to the 1980s and the 1960s, back to the disillusionments of the late 1870s after the government foreclosed Reconstruction. They are my cousins, my neighbors, my pals. They’re between almost every line of the Kerner Report. And no one is listening to them now.

This reckoning event would in part entail stories of the ways in which the poison of racism has ruined lives and wrecked families, like the Rushes of Lowndes County, a sparsely populated, desperately poor patch of central Alabama. Two years ago, during a congressional hearing, Pamela Sue Rush discussed the devastating squalor to which she’d been relegated for most of her life. Rush was enlisted to become an activist against her own poverty and poor health care options. In July, she died of Covid-19. She was 50.

The country deserves to hear her family discuss her underlying conditions and how they took hold on the land of the former slave quarters that held her mobile home. Citizens of Lowndes could inform the country of their lack of access to plumbing or basic sanitation services, about their shouldering of a disproportionate share of this pandemic. The Rosses could stand before the country and tell of Clyde’s losses, fights and gains. Then we’d hear from the officials and schemers who neglected and bilked them. Their confessors would be the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King, Terry Gross, Katie Couric, Trevor Noah, Brian Lehrer, Cheryl Strayed and Connie Chung, people who excel at listening, people whom Americans are used to listening to, people whose ears seem connected directly to their hearts. The listening feels important. So does the facilitation of dialogue. This makes someone like Winfrey critical to the undertaking. She is a pioneer of televised reckoning and remains a master facilitator.

In June, in the midst of the protests, Winfrey held a two-night, existential video conference call that included Hannah-Jones; Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms; and the antipoverty activist the Rev. William Barber II. Titled “Where Do We Go From Here?” it made for a snapshot of a potential commission. For Apple TV+, Winfrey has just begun holding conversations about our times with thought leaders and others. She was made for The Moment. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was a 25-year truth and reconciliation commission.

Over a series of weeks, the scope would zoom out and contract, telling stories about the country in order to place the lives of individuals in a national context. We’ve grown used to television that’s both expansionist and screen-pinching, macrocosmic and personal: “The Wire,” “Hamilton,” “O.J.: Made in America” and the Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance.” We’ve devoured “Star Trek,” “Star Wars,” “Game of Thrones,” “Harry Potter,” the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago Cubs, and 70 years of soap operas. Sagas are a food group. Obviously, barriers exist to wanting and understanding this one. We think we know it. We don’t think we need to know it. “I have a Black friend.” “I saw Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War.’” “Obama.”

Every title on that list is, in its way, an entertainment, and so, perhaps, is this event. It should be a spectacle. It shouldn’t be spectacular. Maybe some nights ought to feature gospel choirs and tribal groups, music by Kendrick Lamar, Lila Downs, Pamyua, Gladys Knight and Rhiannon Giddens. Maybe every installment should simply feature the lustrous power of Bernice Johnson Reagon, Rutha Mae Harris and Bettie Mae Fikes, the voices of the civil rights movement. Fikes is “the Voice of Selma” and the most important living American singer without a Wikipedia entry. She vowed that the singing she did at John Lewis’s funeral would be her last. Someone should beg her to reconsider.

Entertainment, here, would be a sobering virtue, catharsis rather than a loophole. There would be serious room made for spiritual address and cosmic redress; for acknowledgments of country and native land stewardship; for many nights of Native Americans reinserting themselves in the nation’s narrative, troubling it, setting it right; for breath work and silence that assists us through the heft of this undertaking. There should be readings and dancing and photography and bands and orchestras. There would be a place, as well, for comedy, some of which would arise on its own, some of which might necessitate actual comedians. Laughter helps.

There is no shame in entertainment intended to restore, heal, repair, reveal, reframe, to midwife. A belief in that aspect of entertainment is what once brought historic droves of us to “Roots.” We just didn’t know what to do once it was over. That finale ends with its formerly enslaved family standing atop the hills of Lauderdale County, Tenn., as though it were the beginning of “The Sound of Music.”

Feels like a comfort now. But in 1977, the predominant response was a deep sigh. The Center for Policy Research polled 500 Black Americans and 500 white Americans and found that many people were saddened by “Roots.” It was a Moment that ultimately withered.

This Moment didn’t come cheaply. It should not be squandered. It should be nationally witnessed and absorbed. Truth and reconciliation is a death and a birth, accordingly arduous, tense, procedural, affirming, painful. The outcome feels secondary to the process. The ritual is the benefit. The Moment demands that we summon the courage to put ourselves through it. At last.

Photo credits for photo illustration: Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Television (“Roots”); ESPN Films (“O.J.: MADE in AMERICA”); Mandel Ngan, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images and Harpo Productions (“The Oprah Winfrey Show”); Colin Urquhart (“Long Night’s Journey Into Day”); HBO (“The Wire”); Sara Krulwich, via The New York Times (“Hamilton”); 20th Century Fox (“Hidden Figures”); Associated Press (“The Phil Donahue Show”