Truth commissions fail as national reconciliation unless wider coalitions bear across-time witness

Evidence

One abiding occupation – an enduring commitment – of those who have lived through especially the larger traumas of racial colonization, racial derogation, and subjection has recently been bearing witness, giving testimony. Testimony and bearing witness are possible only for those with first-hand, direct experience of and immediate proximity to death and deathly violence. In the past decade or so, formal fora have emerged to facilitate bringing witness, as evidenced by the popularity of various national truth commissions. And yet renewed racial terror and trauma become that much more possible, and the formal fora serve as rationalizations at worst or partial exercises in national reconciliation at best, unless a broader circle of commentators – historians, concerned citizens, political activists – are prepared coalitionally to draw attention to the horrors and cumulative burdens (spectacular or everyday) to the weights of race, elsewhere in but enduring across time or place. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1857

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the truth-commission history I know from South Africa’s TRC literature and to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s attention to whose testimony gets recorded. — connects to: National reconciliation via confession can come at the longer-term cost of justice — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1580; Toothless truth commissions still provoke military establishment backlash — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 323
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which truth commissions succeeded or failed because of who was in the witnessing coalition, not just because of their formal design?