Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation: Creating Public Sentiment

\nAbraham Lincoln understood the importance of public sentiment to our democracy when he debated Stephen Douglas in 1858. ?In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything,? Lincoln noted. ?With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.?1\nA little over a century later, in 1967, President Lyndon Baines Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, Jr. to search for and identify the root causes of the riots that erupted in over 150 cities across the United States during the summer of 1967. When it issued its report the Kerner Commission cited institutional racism, police brutality, and lack of employment opportunity as the causes of the 1967 uprisings. Forty-nine years later, the conclusions cited by the Kerner Commission are still relevant. Institutional and structural racism still perpetuate barriers to employment. Police brutality along with myriad inequities in opportunity for health, housing, education, transportation, and most of the social determinants of wellbeing still persist today. These barriers remain despite significant efforts to close these opportunity gaps and despite the Civil Rights legislative and judicial victories of that era.\nThe Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT, http://healourcommunities.org) work launched by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) is a national truth and reconciliation process for the United States of America, its territories, and the sovereign nations of indigenous people within its borders. The TRHT, while informed by the well-recognized truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) model, is a unique process designed to reflect, embrace, and address the unprecedented diversity and unparalleled racialized history of the United States. Lincoln knew the primacy of the public ?sentiment? in 1858. The Kerner Commission emphasized its importance again in 1968. Its final report, which still stands as the country's most thorough public research on racism put it this way:\n\nThe need is not so much for the government to design new programs as it is for the nation to generate new will. Private enterprise, labor unions, churches, foundations, universities, and all our urban institutions must deepen their involvement in the life of the city and their commitment to its renewal and welfare.2\n\nIn times of palpable and, yes, violent racial strife, civic leaders have understood the primacy of public sentiment and public will in efforts to restore and sustain peace and civility. Yet we have never as a nation implemented a concerted or comprehensive strategy to generate public sentiment and will for a united and healed national consciousness on issues of racial division and inequity. Our centuries-old failure to do so has spawned a legacy of division which today, as in the past, threatens the stability, economic viability, and future of America. TRC is an internationally recognized process of helping divided countries to come back together or ?reconcile? after war, human rights atrocities, and sometimes after protracted traumatic divisions. These truth-telling efforts have been used most often to reunite previously warring factions, the most widely recognized of which is the South African TRC process. The process has been implemented over 44 times around the world. The most recent process in Canada, focused on historic mistreatment of indigenous children and forced separation of families, released its report in the Fall of 2015.3\nTRHT work in the United States leverages the brand and overriding intention of truth and reconciliation models. This U.S. adaptation emphasizes transformation rather than reconciliation. The original TRC model for bringing a country back together through reconciliation is not appropriate in the United States, where racism and the belief in a hierarchy of human value are integral to the nation's foundational processes. For example, Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3, said that enslaved persons were to be counted as 3/5 of a whole person. Thus, the TRHT work must be designed to transform the undergirding ideology of a hierarchy of human value and to transform the societal structures that are still supporting this antiquated belief in the lack of inherent worth or value of people of color. Participating TRHT communities will apply a specific TRHT framework in their efforts to reveal the truth and use it to foster healing that can usher in needed public sentiment, indeed political will, to do what has previously been impossible: transform America into a nation that values all people equally and reconstructs itself on that fundamental truth, as aspired to in the Declaration of Independence (U.S., 1776):\n\nAll? are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.\n\n\nWhat Is Public Sentiment?\nThe Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines public sentiment as follows: ?An attitude, thought, or judgment colored or prompted by feeling or emotion.? The Cambridge English Dictionary introduces the word ?idea? into its definition of sentiment. ?A thought, opinion, or idea based on a feeling about a situation; a way of thinking.? It is the latter, the way of thinking, that has the most relevance to TRHT.\nPublic sentiment in the 21st century is influenced and assessed in ways that were unimaginable in the 19th and 20th centuries. Information technology capabilities, polling methodologies, communications, media, particularly social media and global influences combine today to create an overwhelmingly dynamic landscape of public opinion. Even so, the issue of racism is no less salient today than it was when Lincoln and Douglas debated, or when President Johnson created the Kerner Commission. Add to the crowded public opinion/sentiment landscape the recent deliberative and participatory democracy movement that has been gaining momentum since the 1990s. People across America in their local communities are engaging on issues of concern and using their muscle to influence policies. As exciting as these citizen engagement developments are, they are not designed to consider conscious or unconscious racial biases. During the early 1990s, I served as the director of the Innovations in American Government Awards Program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Our review teams were always impressed by the emerging participatory governance models such as citizen-based budgeting and deliberative democracy initiatives. Engaging diverse groups of citizens in decision-making and thoughtful deliberation on critical issues seemed to be a good strategy for pushing back against the then (as now) rising tide of anti-government sentiment. Berkeley Professor Ian Haney Lopez's 2015 groundbreaking book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class uncovered the solid connection between anti-government sentiment and America's racialized politics, both past and present.4 The book provides a platform for a deeper consideration of how economic, legal, and social policy debates can mask deep-seated, but easily manipulated racial biases. The 2016 presidential election did not use coded racist messages but was more overt and directly inflammatory and divisive, seemingly intentionally leveraging racial anxieties and fears to mobilize voters. The election outcome ushered in documented increases in hate crimes, child bullying, and immigrant intimidation along with white nationalist discourse, deemed unacceptable in recent decades.\nLincoln's talk about the power of public sentiment in 1858 and the Kerner commission's call for the public will to engage in urban issues were, I believe, thinly veiled calls for changing hearts and minds about race and racism. The promise of democracy in America cannot be fully realized without responding to this call. WKKF and, to date, over 50 other foundations agree that it is now time for communities throughout America to begin this deliberative racial healing work. We are supporting TRHT coalition efforts locally and nationally that are explicitly and transparently focused on eliminating the very notion, belief, and false ideology of a human value hierarchy based on physical characteristics?racism.\nThe goal of the TRHT is to change the way the people in America think about issues of racism by exposing and addressing the fallacy of the dominant belief and subsequent societal systems of racial hierarchy. Belief in a hierarchical taxonomy or classification system for the human family was formalized by Swedish botanist Linnaeus in the 1700s. He was building on a then centuries-old Doctrine of Discovery in the Papal Bull issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, which became the basis for all land acquisition by non-indigenous people in the New World. Linnaeus codified a biological system of superiority and inferiority for diverse humans from different geographic locations into ?races.? These racial groups also had varying physical characteristics. Behavioral and character traits were assigned to these groups which became the basis of so-called scientific racism. It was used to justify and rationalize violations of humanity for centuries. Although now discredited by science, the legacy of this widely held and deeply embedded belief in racial hierarchy still lives today. It still resides in all of the normalizing, socializing, and standardizing systems and institutions of today. From education to art, to media and religion, to politics and finance, the legacy of racial hierarchy?as a core societal construct?still exists. Public sentiment today in America is still largely shaped by racism.\n\n\nThe Urgency of Now\nPopulation demographics create an urgency for ridding our society of the burden of racism. According to the U.S. Census data, most of the children born in America today are children of color. The majority of thes

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