Friday Notes, February 23, 2024
Dear Friends —
The elements of meaningful atonement are: own, apologize, repair — and don’t do it again. That is, take responsibility for the breadth of your actions that have led to this moment of understanding and regret; make a sincere statement to the person or people harmed; do everything you can to fix the psychological or material damage you’ve caused; and don’t repeat the mistake in the future. At least that’s the A+ version. Most of us don’t quite get to that standard when we screw up, but even a limited version of own, apologize, repair can heal a hurt — and learning how not to err again prevents a lot of future recriminations.
In recent years, lots of institutions, from governments to churches to universities, have publicly owned some of their past wrongs. In 2019, Belgium apologized for crimes during its colonial past, including kidnapping children from families in Burundi, Rwanda, and Congo. The Canadian government apologized for the brutal treatment of the indigenous Inuit people. Pope John Paul II has made so many apologies for past actions and teachings of the Catholic church that there is a Wikipedia page devoted to the list. And just this week, the Yale University leadership joined peer institutions in public remorse for earlier support for slavery when it stated:
Today, on behalf of Yale University, we recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, throughout our early history, participated in slavery.
The “own” part of the atonement assignment is not too challenging in cases like this, given the ambiguity afforded by time: the current generation is owning a responsibility on behalf of their long-ago predecessors (whisper: who are really the ones to blame, which we now know because we are enlightened). And it’s pretty easy to construct the “apology,” patterned on lots of others that have been issued in the past few years (see Harvard and Brown, for example).
In this case, as in several others, the public apology also gestures toward “repair,” with investments in a memorial marking the contributions of slaves, increased financial transfers to the city of New Haven, and collaboration with historically Black colleges and universities. These actions are all better than nothing — probably enough for a thumbs-up emoji on the social media posts — and something to point to when the students start marching.
So we have a model for three-quarters of the task, but whenever I see one of these public apologies I worry that we aren’t doing well at all on “don’t do it again.”
The challenge hinges on what the “it” is in “don’t do it again.” If the “it” is the moral wrong constructed in a particular distant time and place, then it’s easy to avoid a repeat. Yale, Harvard, and Brown are at no risk of depending on slave labor to build the next campus edifice, and they are equally unlikely to explicitly bar Black students from admissions.
But what if the “it” were defined more broadly? Will these universities say “no” to naming buildings after big donors people who happen to be making their money through exploitation of people and the planet? Will they increase the pathways to admission for students in under-resourced public schools? Will they make sure that every medical school graduate has the consciousness and skills to overcome implicit bias in delivering care? It’s harder — and more meaningful — to figure out how to root out in today’s systems the evil logic that animated slavery 160 years ago.
The broad “it”s are harder to see than the narrow “it”s. Public apologies are usually for acts and mindsets that, in their time, were seen as acceptable by most — even if a minority of people did have the moral clarity at the time to see the wrong in front of their eyes. So detecting how the core wrongs are being manifested in our own time may require thinking about what our great-grandchildren will probably be apologizing for, while looking back at us with a combination of anger and pity. Here’s a starting list:
Over-policing and over-prosecution, which has led to Black people comprising close to 40 percent of the U.S. prison population — and almost half of the people facing life sentences.
Financial and political support that enables human rights abuses suffered by the Palestinian people.
Permitting religious zealotry to compromise the bodily autonomy of women.
Despoilation of the Earth and the inequitable consequences across the globe.
Maybe we should figure out how to start at the end, with “don’t do it again” and then some “repair.” Could we spare those great-grandchildren the pain of owning and apologizing?
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The New York Times seems to have a soft spot for urban owls. In 2021, it dedicated lots of column inches of sentimental prose to the death of Barry, the Central Park Owl. And this week, in the wake of Flaco the Owl’s fatal encounter with the wall of a building near the park, the Times published not one but five (!) long, moody articles describing every phase of Flaco’s life, death, and impact on the city. Here’s one.
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Just for fun (and we definitely need some fun), here’s a timeless routine from a few years ago.
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth