Violence, silence and the four truths: towards healing in U.S.-American historical memory

ABSTRACT

The articles collected here argue that there is much at stake in how memory is made, particularly at public sites where the United States’ exceptionalism and ‘greatness’ are contested. How is memory made in these places? Whose voices are represented and who controls access? How are communities taking back control, asserting their own stakes in iconic national stories and demanding recognition? Authors in this volume examine memories that haunt both diasporic and Indigenous communities to reflect upon the changing nature of historical memory at sites, up to and including the contemporary moment. This introduction considers ‘white history,’ the violence it emboldens and requires, four types of truth identified by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and public judgement. I integrate these concepts to advocate for working towards a reconciliatory process and healing truth.

KEYWORDS:

• Truth and reconciliation
• public judgment
• white privilege
• narrative
• conflicted heritage

Introduction

The authors in this volume on ‘Heritages Haunting the American Narrative’ grapple with the changing nature of U.S.-American historical memory, up to and including the contemporary moment. Each writes about place-based heritage and various communities that share, represent, contest, and claim memories of the past. These authors argue that there is much at stake in how memory is made, particularly at public sites where America’s exceptionalism and ‘greatness’ is contested. What is at stake is political, social, and economic power, rooted in the power to say what happened, to mark it on the landscape, and to simultaneously silence other histories (Trouillot 1995). Memory is marked and silenced in the built and designed environment all around us every day. This volume is part of an important ongoing conversation among heritage workers concerning our role in negotiating these narratives, representing or amplifying voices, and opening up access to the power embodied there. We seek to shed some light onto communities taking back control, asserting their own stakes in our iconic American stories, and demanding recognition and a seat at the table.

As an introduction to this collection, I propose an approach through which heritage workers might support social healing and truth telling through the rehabilitation of narrative. This approach arises from an integration of four concepts: white privilege as embodied by Seitz’s (2012) ‘white history,’ the violence it emboldens and requires, the four types of truth identified by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and public judgement. I propose that integrating these concepts into on-the-ground work in communities support a potentially transformative process of healing truth.

In his 2012 article in the museum journal, Curator, provocatively titled, ‘No More White History,’ historian Phillip Seitz (2012) characterises ‘white history’ as an amalgamation of selective memory, the glorification of privilege, and the suppression of truth. Writing from the context of a historic house museum but applying his argument more broadly, he makes a plea that we should stop doing that kind of history. His argument is not that we should stop doing histories of ‘white’ people or of whiteness as a racialized category, but rather that we need to recognise structures of historical narratives that promote partial history as if it were complete. In addition, disciplines which study the past must actively rehabilitate their work through the true inclusion of people of colour, both as subjects of the past and as creators of historical narrative. Selective memory leaves out key elements of the past, especially those parts that reflect poorly on white people, avoiding what is painful, shameful or immoral. Glorification of privilege means that white privilege is justified and celebrated. I want to point out that this concept is deeper than that as well. Privilege itself becomes deeply embedded as a root concept that supports cultural violence sustaining the status quo. The impacts of white history reach well beyond race, as the structure of privilege enables and makes invisible all the interconnected -isms based on sex, gender, ability, etc. The narrative structure of privilege – of worthiness – requires the counterweight of those who are less worthy. The erasure or dehumanisation of others becomes a necessary narrative structure supporting white privilege and hierarchy. Seitz (2012) argues that uncovering and amplifying more history helps to disrupt selective history. It may sound simple and obvious, but only by telling the truth can we get past the suppression of truth. The courage and persistence required to tell the truth and the danger created by doing so highlights the power of ‘white history.’ Seitz is diving into the ongoing analysis and debate about whiteness, white privilege, white supremacy, and white racial hierarchy (e.g. Frankenberg 1993; Lipsitz 1998; McIntosh 1992; powell 2012; Wildman 1996).

If we are to survive as a free society, working towards becoming a peaceful equitable society striving for its stated values of liberty and justice for all, then we must stop doing ‘white history’ that serves as cultural violence. Such violence is part of the stable triad of violence defined by sociologist Johan Galtung (1969, 1990). Galtung defines a triad of forms of violence: direct (physical and psychological), structural, and cultural. These three forms reinforce and stabilise each other. Structural violence is embedded in the social structures of oppression that harm people by interfering with their basic needs. Such structures include sexism, racism, homophobia and elitism. Cultural violence is any aspect of culture – including implicated portions of history, heritage and historic preservation – that legitimises either or both direct and structural violence. The white racial hierarchy is structural violence. Making the structure more visible by challenging privilege and hierarchy in the built environment – as the authors in this collection do – is a necessary step. Writing of white privilege, Stephanie Wildman (1996, 24) observes, ‘Once the hierarchy is made visible, the problems remain no less complex, but it becomes possible to discuss them in a more revealing and useful fashion.’

These forms of violence support and reinforce each other. Seitz’s ‘white history’ is an example of cultural violence that pervades each of the heritage explorations in this volume as the authors expose it and seek to provide a different narrative. What might it mean to stop suppressing the truth in the ways that so often shape American history? The language of landscape and the built environment has too often been used as a slow, silencing violence. New Orleans’ and other southern cities’ confederate monuments and other public symbols of the Confederacy glorify the Lost Cause mythology, an example of the way in which ‘white history’ rewrites history to hide the truth.

As of 29 July 2018, as part of its online Confederate Monument Interpretation Guide, the Atlanta History Centre explains the Lost Cause:

“[T]his ideology maintained that secession was justified in defence of Constitutional liberties. It stated that white Southern men defended their homes nobly against insurmountable odds. It insisted that slavery was not a cruel institution and – most importantly – that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War.

Implicit in the “Lost Cause” was the belief, widely accepted throughout the United States, in white racial supremacy. Celebrations of the Lost Cause often went hand-in-hand with campaigns to enact laws mandating “Jim Crow” segregation and disenfranchising African American voters which also sparked racial violence, including lynching, well into the twentieth century.”

In May of 2017, the city of New Orleans, Louisiana finished removing four monuments to the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, joining some U.S. cities in these efforts and inspiring others. People took control of the narrative inscribed in their own landscape and confronted the violent racism haunting the city by claiming the right to change the language of place-based historical memory.

The four truths

To better understand the complexity of what the concept of truth might embody so that we might tell better truths, we can look to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission (TRC 1998; see also Terrell 2004) identified four types of truths. These are: Factual or Forensic truth, Personal or Narrative truth, Social or Dialogic truth, and the Public or Healing truth, which is the truth emerging from the reconciliatory process. Violence haunts and constricts narratives. Therefore, examining intersections between past and present violence may help us see possibilities for healing through the rehabilitation of narrative. To illustrate the four truths and how they can be understood in the context of historical narrative, I consider how a narrative about the removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans intersects with ideas about truth. I illustrate those truths in terms of both the built landscape and the words of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (2017) whose eloquent speech after the removal of these monuments provides context for the meaning of the monuments and their removal.

The Factual or Forensic truth is the provable facts of an event. Heritage workers will immediately see the ambiguity even there, at the most basic provable truth can be elusive. In the case of the monuments, the factual truth covers the who, what, when, and where of their construction, placement and maintenance. The removed monuments were statues of three heroes of the confederacy – Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P. G. T. Beauregard – and the Liberty Place monument, which celebrated white supremacists attacking the city’s racially integrated police force during the Reconstruction Era.

The monuments were erected between 1884 and 1915 during the low point of American racial politics that took the form of Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, legalised and illegal terrorism of white against black, and the rewriting of many state constitutions to effectively deny citizenship to African Americans. In his speech the Mayor did not summarise the construction facts of the memorials but acknowledged the truth of the power of their placement in the city, saying that these monuments that ‘put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honour is an inaccurate recitation of our full past.’ He emphasised that ‘They were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city’ (Landrieu 2017).

The Personal or Narrative truth is the truth each of us tells ourselves based on our experiences. The Mayor – who is white – acknowledged that he ‘must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought.’ However, he was willing to hear another’s personal truth. This narrative truth provoked a new understanding and highlights the kind of listening and dialogue needed for make change. The Mayor talked about a friend who:

“asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth” (Landrieu 2017).

Many different personal truths are forged into social truths. The social or dialogic truth is constructed by multiple individual narratives competing to be the socially recognised truth. There will be competing social truths, created and curated by different communities. The hegemonic social truth can become cultural violence, which was the case, for example, with the Lost Cause.

For over a century, these four large statues dominated the monumental landscape of New Orleans, creating the fiction that there was an agreed upon ‘white history’ that was the single truth of the city. The Mayor summarised the new social truth: ‘These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitised Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for’ (Landrieu 2017).

Those pursuing the fourth truth – the Public or Healing truth – intentionally seek what it takes to right a wrong. This process of truth seeking exposes disparate personal and social truths and works to reconcile them and seek a shared understanding about their meanings. This process can take a long time. Mayor Landrieu expressed this truth this way: ‘This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong’ (Landrieu 2017).

‘Making right what was wrong’ is the challenge and the hope. How can we do more of that with our tools and vantage points as heritage workers? What does it take to get to the healing truth? We can be reasonably certain that healing comes in many forms, and certainly not only through words. However eloquent and moving Mayor Landrieu’s speech was, it would have had little power if the monuments had not been removed.

It wasn’t the Mayor’s speech (see also Landrieu 2018) that began the unravelling of the old narrative and the truth telling. It was the agitation of activists, the people of New Orleans, who had lived with the hauntings of the Lost Cause too long. The African American communities of the city had curated the truths needed to come to this newly recognised public truth: that the landscape needed to be freed from the statues haunting it. Such a new truth is one of the elements needed in the reconciliatory process.

This New Orleans example demonstrates that telling a truth is not simply a matter of words but is a physical act. Both professional and community heritage workers advocate for tangible statements about and with such monuments. Discussions about monuments and memorials have been ongoing for decades (e.g. Blight 2001; Levinson 2018; Savage 1997, Shackel 2003) and have expanded considerably since the upswing of racist violence by neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates marked by the 2015 murders in Charleston, South Carolina.

There are hundreds of monuments to the Confederacy in the United States (SPLC 2018). Options for addressing these material markers on the landscape, broadly stated, include 1) leaving them as they are, 2) adding to them, and 3) removing them (see also Allison 2018). Each of those options is potentially complex. Arguments to leaving them as they are often appeal to a need to respect and ‘save’ history. Adding to them is done by adding other memorials, or adding signage or other material to change their meaning. Activists use this technique when they add paint or tags, usually a temporary intervention. Memorials on the landscape can be actively contextualised by historians, educators and community members. These ‘teachable places’ can provide teachable moments incorporated into walking or driving tours, exhibits at local museums or community centres, and intentional dialogues.

Removal can be outright destruction or moving them to another location, including storage or display in a museum setting. Dell Upton (2017) writes about the public debate over what to do with Confederate monuments in the context of our civic values. He rejects opinions that this debate is about preserving or erasing history, censoring art, or commemorating the Civil War. He writes it is not even a conflict about monuments: ‘It is a conflict over the values that we wish to endorse in the contemporary public realm.’ He would like to see all of the monuments removed: ‘for reasons of justice, equity, and civic values, they must first of all be removed from civic space. Their white-supremacist character is more important than their age, their aesthetic quality, or any other attributes that are offered in their defence.’

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, based in Montgomery, Alabama, continues to update their 2016 report, ‘Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy’ Most recently, they report that just 110 Confederate symbols have been removed since the 2015 murders in Charleston South Carolina. There are at least 1,728 still standing, including 772 monuments and hundreds of named places such as schools, counties, towns, and roads, as well as state holidays and more. The report’s Executive Summary (SPLC 2018) ends with this challenge:

“As a consequence of the national reflection that began in Charleston, the myths and revisionist history surrounding the Confederacy may be losing their grip in the South.

Yet, for the most part, the symbols remain.

The effort to remove them is about more than symbolism. It’s about starting a conversation about the values and beliefs shared by a community.

It’s about understanding our history as a nation.

And it’s about acknowledging the injustices of the past as we address those of today.”

This power of re-claiming is important for the possibilities of peace-building, justice, and the health of communities. What is at stake in the city of New Orleans and in every community fighting for justice over the ways in which memory is made and truth is told is people’s lives and futures. There is much at stake in our language and intentions. Depending our our choices about remembering and truth-telling, we can build or destroy; we can strengthen or challenge; we can commit violence or build inter-connected communities. Before we can fully realise healing truths, we need to clearly recognise and name social truths, especially the underlying structure of white racial hierarchy (powell 2012).

In our current political context in the United States heritage workers who commit themselves to heritage as a tool for social justice must be diligent in reclaiming truths. We cannot acquiesce to language, heritage or memory being co-opted. We can seek inspiration in the ways in which people are reclaiming memory and truth and rehabilitating language, not only of words, but of place, of public place, of landscape, and the legacies that are coded in those places. In his analysis of privilege and whiteness, john powell (2012, 76) advocates a ‘communicative ethic’ and emphasises the ‘importance of both marginalised and privileged groups in jointly confronting exclusionary ideas, practices, and structures.’

Public judgment through civic dialogue

Honest civil dialogue about values, history, and both past and present injustice is critical to destabilise the triad of direct, structural and cultural violence. Institutional racism, sexism, and other persistent bigotries are deeply embedded in many U.S.-American heritage stories about our past and who we are today. These forms of structural violence stabilise and perpetuate cultural violence of erasure and marginalisation while centralising and normalising the white identity core to ‘white history.’ The heritage chosen and expressed in confederate symbols is both deeply embedded and deeply dysfunctional in a public sphere that ideologically claims support for the rights of all people. The public sphere is where civic dialogue takes place.

The social truth of the hegemonic mainstream public sphere always creates unmet demands. Isolated demands can be repressed, ignored, or integrated but when unmet demands coalesce, they form a counterpublic with enough force to transform the hegemonic public. This process in turn creates unmet demands, continuing the process. A sick state is characterised by repressed critique while a healthy state has enough active public spheres to encourage counterpublics and constant critique (Bruner 2010). The ‘state’ in this concept can be thought of as a polity at any scale.

The truth matters to the health of a society. Rhetorician M. Lane Bruner (2010, 56), theorising how publics and public spheres are constructed, sees a direct relationship between the quality of human communication and the healthy state and identifies perceptions about the past as crucial to such health. When perceived and real history do not match in the hegemonic public, the state more easily becomes sick. Bruner sees (2010, 69) a ‘world-historical problem of the persistent distance between fact and opinion, between knowledge and belief, and between the unfolding of history and its complex causes and the way that history is characterised and interpreted.’

Dialogues in the public sphere involve confrontations between different social truths, from differing publics and counterpublics. It is important to see that the four truths – forensic, personal, social, and healing – are not necessarily linear or sequential. Nor do they remain true if they are built on partial or distorted versions of the other types of truth. Erasure or the refusal to acknowledge or remember the forensic truth complicates memory and the narratives that represent it.

Forensic truths that have been erased or obscured can haunt the public sphere, as exemplified by each of the contributors to this collection. Personal narratives that make sense of forensic truths may become muted or silenced. Certain social truths are privileged by being considered worthy of study and funding, worthy of remembering and inscribing on the landscape. Other social truths may be suppressed or erased. The hauntings remain. How does a city like New Orleans – or a critical mass of people in any place – come to be able to change public judgment and the physical expression of that judgment to get to a potentially healing truth?

Public judgment is different from public opinion. Opinions are often raw, unstable, or unexamined, especially for their consequences. Public judgment may take a long time to form. It starts with raising consciousness of unacknowledged and counterpublic truths. It forms through intentional cognitive work, working through necessary changes in attitude and action.

Daniel Yankelovich (1991, 2010) argues that people advance through three distinct stages before they form politically meaningful and responsible judgments about public issues. These stages are 1) consciousness raising, 2) working through, and 3) resolution. In the first stage people become aware of an issue and start to take it seriously. During this stage, I believe that re-examining, correcting and expanding the forensic truth are important processes. It matters that erased heritage is resurrected and told. There is widespread ignorance in the United States, for example, about Indian Boarding Schools (Montgomery 2018, this volume) and World War II incarcerations of Japanese American citizens (Lau-Ozawa 2018, this volume; Clark and Amati 2018, this volume). African American history is routinely erased and segregated (Baram 2018, this volume; Jackson 2018, this volume). The telling of ‘untold’ stories and the representing of the under-represented, help to crack the complacency of the ‘white history’ of the hegemonic public sphere.

Adding forensic truth alone is not likely to be enough to provoke people to work through their judgments. It is also necessary to become conscious of competing personal and social truths. The facts are insufficient, for example, to correct the distortions Laura Galke (2018, this volume) confronts regarding historians’ erasure and belittlement of Mary Washington, George Washington’s mother. Challenges to hegemonic social truths are necessary to provoke the search for other counter-narratives.

The second stage of ‘Working through’ is a difficult and emotionally charged stage where people struggle to reconcile their values with the issues. This stage, when the need for change starts to become apparent and trade-offs come into focus, can take a very long time. Working through requires that people confront their wishful thinking. Wishful thinking, on the part of white people would include the mythology of white exceptionalism. When conflicting constituencies are engaged with the meanings and representations of heritage issues, it may be an opportunity to move toward more responsible public judgment. Intentional effort is needed to ensure that the addition of people of colour’s heritage stories provokes working through and not simply adding disconnected forensics truths. Antoinette Jackson (2018, this volume) describes a disturbing persistent segregation of white and black history in a National Park, effectively adding facts while suppressing higher truths and discouraging any process of working through.

The middle stage of working through, essential to Public judgment is where dialogue comes in. Dialogue in this practise of working through is not just conversation (Yankelovich 1999). While debate is based on the assumption that there is a right answer and the debater has it, dialogue instead assumes that many people have pieces of the right answer and must come together to craft a solution. Dialogue supports respect for differing points of view and nurtures civility. Three criteria are essential to Dialogue are 1) equality and an absence of coercion, 2) empathetic listening, and 3) bringing assumptions – our deeply held beliefs – out into the open fearlessly. Meeting those conditions are not easy; they require mutual trust, which can take enormous effort and emotional investment to build. Dialogue is key to Bonnie Clark and Anne Amati’s (2018, this volume) project pairing community members and students as co-curators of museum and digital displays. The exhibit intentionally makes something positive out of historical tragedy.

Yankelovich (2010, 17) explains more about the “working through” stage:

The time required for people to come to sound judgment on complex, emotion-laden issues depends on the issue and varies enormously. Some issues require only months to complete the learning curve to reach sound public judgment; other issues take decades or even centuries (e.g. slavery or women’s rights).”

Sometimes working through requires seismic shifts in social truths, prodded by asking different questions. In the complex history of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, for example, Kat Hayes (2018, this volume) asks at what cost freedom and opportunity? It is a question the seeks to disrupt the very structure of the standard American narrative that values freedom and opportunity above all else. Paul Shackel (2018, this volume) challenges the glorification of capitalism by examining the legacy of violence against immigrant workers and the devastation of the landscape in the Pennsylvania coal industry.

The ‘Resolution’ stage results in responsible public judgment for which people have worked through emotional and intellectual issues and are prepared to accept the consequences of their actions. The steps of public judgment can be engaged with the intention of moving toward healing truth. Uzi Baram (2018, this volume) calls our attention to memory work as both ethical and historical practise, finding the potential for healing in the Jewish tradition of facing the silenced past.

Research does not support the assumption that people simply need more or more accurate forensic truths to make informed and well-reasoned decisions. According to Yankelovich and Friedman (2010) facts and increased information play only a minor role in the public’s learning curve. Their work provides insights into the relative importance of information, emotion, and values in decision-making. Values and emotion, perhaps more so than factual information, play central roles in heritage. So, while the forensic truth is important and needs to be meticulously pursued, it is the personal and social truths, laden with all of their emotional baggage, that need careful attention while working toward the truths of public healing and reconciliation.

The embedded structural violence of the white racial hierarchy and the social and political dilemmas associated with it require public working through. That process will only work if all groups participate in the dialogue. ‘[I]t is not enough for marginalised groups to claim their voices for their communities of their worlds. They must participate in the making of the whole society and the selves that inhabit it’ (powell 2012, 98).

We need to expend sustained intentional effort to raise consciousness and to work through meanings if we are to succeed in changing cultural narratives, expectations, and reality. Where there is conflict – where the counter-spheres are making themselves heard – there is opportunity. Especially when communities and heritage workers are seeking to move those meanings and representations toward justice for marginalised or erased groups, there are opportunities to widen the cracks in the structures of oppression. Each of the articles in this collection is part of that effort.

Healing

The violence of racism and the glorification of white privilege are real and they also mask the violence suffered by white people and the damaging consequences of white supremacy for both white people and people of colour. Seitz calls on white people to be conscious and accountable about history. He (2012, 282) emphasises that:

“White people need to understand the cumulative toll inflicted by suppressing this information, and the need for all of us to assume responsibility for providing it with a forum, condemning it, grieving it, and helping to carry it so that those who already do so are not alone. This is why failing to say something doesn’t leave things as they are; it makes them worse. The more evasions and falsehoods we project into the atmosphere, the more we dishonour those who never deserved to be hurt in the first place.”

‘White history’ obscures our common bonds of pain. James Baldwin 1963, 9) understood the danger for white people in rejecting white supremacy, as it would be devastatingly disorienting:

For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for so many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame.

The myth of white supremacy cracks a little further when new questions are asked. It is not enough, however, to understand that all groups must be at the table. Accepting ‘otherness’ strengthens and legitimates the existing hierarchy. Advocating for a transformative model, powell (2012, 92) argues that ‘valorizing otherness ignores that otherness is bound up in the rejected norm as well; in this way such valorization feeds that norm in a profound way.’

What if there is no Other? What is there is only Us? (Urrea 2017). What if the purpose of heritage is to comfort and heal? What, then, should we do? How shall we seek to tell the truth? How shall we work to raise consciousness, work through conflicting and persistent truths, and come to healing resolutions? The authors in this collection are participating in a dialogue that is part of the answer to those questions.

Acknowledgments

In my title, from Murphy (2005) via Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, I use US-America to acknowledge the United States of America’s hegemonic and imperialistic claim to the language and identity of the American hemisphere. Most of the authors in this collection presented papers at the January 2018 Society for Historical Archaeology conference in the session, Making American Memory Great Again, organised by Katherine Hays, Paul Shackel and me. I am indebted to my co-organisers for their insight in crafting the questions that lend coherence to this collection. I thank Kat Hays for leading me to john powell’s work. Much of this discussion of public judgment and public spheres in heritage work is drawn from Little and Shackel (2014).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Barbara J. Little

Barbara J. Little is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She works in public archaeology on issues of public outreach and involvement and on the public relevance of archaeology. Her recent books include: a co-authored volume with Paul A. Shackel - Archaeology, Heritage and Civic Engagement: Working toward the Public Good (2014). She is currently writing The Archaeology of Social Justice.