“The Problem With Your Country Is That You Have No Sense of Collective Shame.”
My wife, who moved from Germany to the United States in the 1990s, once commented to me: “The problem with your country is that you have no sense of collective shame.”
That statement came after years of accompanying me to historical sites across this country and countless hours of the two of us just talking about the history of our respective countries.
It’s an observation also born and nurtured as a result of having grown up in Germany and having been educated at a time when the nation was committed to facing the tough questions about the Nazi era, WWII, and especially the Holocaust.
I was reminded of this observation earlier today as I read an interview with Bryan Stevenson about the ongoing public debate concerning public history and history education. As many of you know, Stevenson is a lawyer, author, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama. Stevenson believes that a healthy justice system must be informed by an honest appraisal of the past.
His organization is largely responsible for the transformation of Montgomery with the opening of a new museum and memorial devoted to the history and memory of slavery and racial violence.
Stevenson beautifully captures the importance of facing our history honestly, with an open heart and mind:
Well, I think when we are honest about history, we learn things, we discover things and we prepare for things differently. I got involved in our work after I went to Johannesburg and saw the apartheid museum there. It blew me away because I’d never been in a museum that was so honest about the legacy of something so devastating. I went to Berlin, and being in Berlin, seeing a landscape where you can’t go 200 meters without seeing a monument or a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, there’s this reckoning with history, and we now see Germany as a partner; they are not the villain that they were in the middle of the 20th century because of that reckoning.
There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And I think that has liberated them, empowered them to create a new democracy that is trusted, respected, vibrant and that’s growing. It doesn’t mean that all the problems have been eliminated, but it does mean that they have recovered something really important, discovered something important. We have not done that in this country. And I think our refusal to do that has left us vulnerable to precisely the kind of political manipulations that we’re seeing today.
So we’re trying to create that truth-telling here. I think some people misjudge it; they think, oh, you keep talking about slavery and lynching and segregation. You want to punish America for this history. I have no interest in punishment. I’m talking about slavery, liberation and segregation because I want to liberate us from the burden that that history creates — that burden that still hangs over us, the fog that that history has created that no one is trying to address.
We know that we can’t go through life and care about someone and love someone and get strong and healthy if we’re unwilling to acknowledge when we make mistakes, to repent for those, to apologize for those. And collectively, we have not done that in the United States.
Discuss.
The people who accuse us of attacking their heritage and of portraying America as evil are the people who identify with the villains of our history. In fact, we are trying to put the focus on the many wonderful people in our history who fought for democracy and justice — like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Thaddeus Stevens.
An important point. Imagine our reaction if Germans today excused fond remembrance of the Nazis with the slogan, "Heritage, not Hate." Surely our jaws would drop.