TRCs and the Work of Mourning

The steady expansion of the discourse and practice of “truth and reconciliation” over the past three decades has been nothing short of remarkable. The International Center for Transitional Justice reports that, as of 2011, over forty official truth commissions have operated on six different continents since Argentina convened the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in 1983.¹⁷ Commissions, though they vary in scope and purpose (not every truth commission is a truth and reconciliation commission, for instance), are broadly motivated to uncover and publicize episodes of state violence, traumatic social injuries, or patterns of abuse, neglect, and marginalization. TRCs reflect the idea that it is incumbent on democratic societies (or societies that aspire to democracy) to provide an account for human rights violations and, in some instances, to make reparations or alter state policies. For many advocates, TRCs are the outgrowth of a developing transnational ethical norm or “duty to remember.”¹⁸ As Martha Minow argues, the “failure to remember” mass violations of human rights or everyday patterns of misrecognition constitutes an “ethical breach.”¹⁹

Beyond ethical imperatives, the work of TRCs is seen as a way of reestablishing political space in the aftermath of civil conflicts or episodes of mass violence. By including narratives of exclusion or violence in public histories of communities, such processes can restore (or acknowledge for the first time) political standing for marginalized or persecuted groups. The inclusion of shameful events in public commemorations and histories, as Thomas McCarthy argues, has a “public-pedagogical significance” insofar as it allows for a more accurate view of political traditions and of the connection between historical patterns of domination and present realities.²⁰ The pedagogy of TRCs, however, often meets with stiff resistance. Political leadership rarely embraces a truth and reconciliation process for its own sake, which is partly why TRCs most often take place during moments of political transition. Resistance to TRCs is not restricted to official spaces, however, but often extends far into civil society. For Jürgen Habermas, this resistance stems in part from a social tendency to focus on simple stories of culpability while downplaying the broader context within which traumatic events take place. Such events therefore appear as exceptions or interruptions, even as they are inevitably shaped by a particular “historical milieu” involving the “mesh of family, local, political and intellectual traditions” that makes “us what we are and who we are today.”²¹ As Habermas puts it, “no one among us can escape unnoticed from this milieu”; we are all touched in a myriad of unseen ways by the habitual aspects of social and cultural life. Truth and reconciliation processes offer one means of providing this honest historical accounting. By reckoning with all the “subtle capillary ramifications” of our social milieu, we potentially mitigate the pathologies of denial and disavowal. For Habermas, this process reflects an imperative political responsibility; in his words, we “have to stand by our traditions”—including their difficult or unspeakable moments—“if we do not want to disavow ourselves.”²² Reckoning resists a “narcissistic” relationship to history that serves to split off traumas of misrecognition in the interests of a sanitized version of the past with which we can identify without guilt or cognitive dissonance. Narcissistic histories, however, elide the importance of a “suspicious gaze made wise by … moral catastrophe.”²³

TRCs seem well positioned to cultivate a suspicion of the historical milieu and the mesh of relationships, habits, and etiquettes that inevitably surround social traumas, in part because they can focus on broader patterns of abuse and bring heretofore-marginalized accounts into public space. As Tutu argued, one of the most significant achievements of the SATRC was “to bring events known until now only to the immediately affected communities … into the center of national life.”²⁴ By virtue of their difference from trials, mechanisms of lustration, or other punitive or retributive measures, TRCs cultivate “new vocabularies of truth and justice,” and “a new institutional repertoire for pursuing them.”²⁵ In this respect, TRCs seem to embody a shift away from what Iris Marion Young called a “liability” framework of justice, in which the identification and punishment of perpetrators takes precedence over tracing the subtle ramifications of traumatic events.²⁶ In the context of structural injustices or patterns of misrecognition, Young argues that a “social connection” framework of justice is normatively and politically preferable because it enjoins a forward-looking process of responsibility that can only be discharged through collective action, instead of focusing on the identification of culprits or scapegoats. For all of these reasons—the public-pedagogical significance of a more difficult, painful collective history; the possibility of cultivating suspicious gazes toward identity-producing traditions and milieus; and the development of a new practice of justice in which social actors connected to traumatic events have an obligation to act—TRCs represent a significant institutional innovation in contemporary societies.

Nevertheless, there are elements within the discourse and practice of TRCs that seem to undercut the possibilities just outlined. For instance, there is a seductive tendency within truth commissions, with the South African TRC being the most notable example, toward a strong notion of reconciliation that insists on holistic ideas of social healing or resolution. The language of healing presupposes a lost level of communal oneness in need of restoration. Yet this language can obscure ongoing conflicts through false narratives of consensus or unity.²⁷ The emphasis on sundered unity betrays fantasies of a prelapsarian state of peace, or it projects citizens into a future in which hatred and misrecognition will merely be a bad memory—as Tutu did when he told the South African commissioners that they “were part of the cosmic movement towards unity, towards reconciliation, that has existed from the beginning of time.”²⁸ Myths of unity—past, present, or future—however, can demonize resistance and license social amnesia. Moreover, the use of moral or spiritual categories such as evil, redemption, and reconciliation can overwhelm the importance of an in-depth understanding of social conditions that formed the context in which the violence occurred.²⁹ At their worst, insistent demands for forgiveness and healing can serve as a silencing tool against those who remain incapable or unwilling to forgive and forget.³⁰ The discourse of reconciliation, then, seems to contain an inner moral pressure that stigmatizes continued disagreements and grievances.³¹ In this vein, Mahmoud Mamdani has asked whether reconciliation in South Africa involved “an embrace of evil,” because “truth … replaced justice.”³² Placed alongside the persistent inequalities within contemporary South African society, some commentators see the “truth” of the TRC to have been, ultimately, of “little value.”³³ If anything, these critics aver, the experience of the truth commission has applied a thin veneer of moral self-congratulation over a society still torn by radical disparities of wealth and health.

When TRC proponents such as Tutu insist that “revealing is healing,” they betray a certain cathartic understanding of trauma and its resolution. TRCs are seen as therapeutic tools whereby victims and perpetrators can unburden or purge themselves of traumatic memories, and the witnessing nation can simultaneously undergo a collective abreaction from the pathogenic forces of social trauma.³⁴ This view appears to be nothing so much as an omnipotent wish to leap out of history. Even if we can see claims for healing and closure as symptoms of a defensible struggle for recognition, this struggle has to countenance the ambivalence of selves and societies that are not only interested in, or motivated by, this struggle.³⁵ The moral psychology on offer within truth and reconciliation processes, then, seems to trade on what Klein would see as the defenses of the paranoid-schizoid position. The past is manically separated from the present in an effort to supersede historical cruelties and traumas, and irredentist voices and claims are split off by nondivisive relational norms and expectations.³⁶

Reconciliation, then, becomes not just an aspiration but also a manic wish and even a normalizing injunction. For instance, Tutu often implored those who gave testimony before the SATRC to speak the language of forgiveness, asking whether victims could forgive their persecutors or whether those who committed acts of violence could ask for forgiveness. For Sonali Chakravarti, this dynamic “hampered opportunities to cultivate trust and a greater responsiveness to the needs of citizens” because instead of “listening to anger” the members of the commission repeatedly attempted to turn anger and bitterness into forgiveness and reconciliation.³⁷ For Chakravarti, the privileging of forgiveness turned anger into an “individual psychological problem” instead of seeing it as a form of “political commentary.”³⁸ Even if participants such as Tutu explicitly acknowledged that reconciliation should not be understood in terms of undoing or healing the past, or erasing social conflicts, his performance on the commission and the language of forgiveness both seemed to marginalize and delegitimize anger, conflict, difference, and disagreement.

Yet the normalizing impulses of one archbishop should not distract us from the broader significance of the TRC. For Aletta Norval, TRCs have become exemplary of a norm of civic accountability, the “idea that citizens may be called upon to account for themselves in the presence of fellow citizens.”³⁹ By giving equal treatment to victims, the TRC staged a scene of recognition that had been impossible under the conditions of apartheid. The SATRC, then, forged “a space in which hitherto unheard voices could express themselves and articulate … their experiences.”⁴⁰ For Norval, this space was not overcoded with forgiveness, healing, or a postpolitical erasure of conflict. Rather, the “whole process, including the debates around it, inaugurated, embodied and inspired a … democratic openness to contestation.”⁴¹ In other words, the TRC should not be reduced to the terms of any of its particular contributors—even the most prominent voices, such as Tutu’s—because the process as a whole was inherently polyvocal and, as such, “constitutively incomplete.”⁴² According to Norval, the incomplete, polyvocal process of civic accountability is what provokes a democratic “aspect change”—the felt sense of distance from a former, less democratic subject position and an inspiration to be more responsive to the work of building and rebuilding a democratic tradition.⁴³

However, does the aspect change on offer in truth and reconciliation change democratic subjectivities or simply change the subject? Norval argues that the inherent openness and contingency within democratic traditions requires that citizens take up agency and responsibility, but this requirement is broadly consistent with the rise of neoliberal discourse and practices. Under neoliberalism, the state necessarily retreats from its historical responsibilities to address social injustices or economic dislocations, leaving citizens to pick up the pieces themselves.⁴⁴ In this vein, Heidi Grunebaum argues that truth and reconciliation is little more than a neoliberal ruse. The “civic language of remembrance and reconciliation” has replaced the “social debt of responsibility,” which facilitates neoliberal practices of responsibilization in which victims of structural forces are compelled to craft a response to their victimization.⁴⁵ Just as workers have become, under the framework of neoliberalism, “entrepreneurs”—eroding the discursive distinction but not the lived difference between bosses and employees—victims of historical injustice are rebranded as democratic agents, charged not only with fitting into the new democratic order but actively shaping that order, despite the heavy burden represented by histories of marginalization, discrimination, and violent misrecognition.

Perhaps, then, Norval’s democratic openness is just an updated, subtler version of Periclean consensus, in which community norms discipline discord and police the boundaries of a certain community. Perhaps then it would be better to reject altogether the discourse and practice of reconciliation as the sources of pernicious myths of social consensus and to affirm instead the importance of contestation or “dissensus” against the chords of democratic harmony.⁴⁶ Agonist critics of the discourse and practice of reconciliation have argued that the search for common ground and the moral psychology of reconciliation (which delegitimizes continued contestation and instead elevates norms such as mutual respect) amount to an amnesia over “irresolvable” conflicts that marginalizes victims of abuse.⁴⁷ The discourse of reconciliation only seems to offer symbolic forms of reparation, and it depoliticizes ongoing struggles over the past and in the present.⁴⁸

In turning away from the supposedly hegemonic regimes of meaning and reference offered by the TRC, however, where exactly do agonist critics turn? Grunebaum’s alternative to the neoliberal “regimes of meaning and reference” on offer in the SATRC is what she refers to as “counter-memory initiatives” of “non-forgiveness.”⁴⁹ As an example, Grunebaum cites the efforts of the Western Cape Action Tour Project (WECAT), organized in the late 1990s by former members of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC). WECAT sponsored tours of townships in which guides would point out how the landscape and layout of the area were shaped by racially motivated policies and state-enforced displacements. Instead of focusing on democratic subjectivities inaugurated by the end of apartheid, these countermemorial practices show how the legacy of apartheid continues to impact the life chances and everyday landscapes of millions of South Africans. These tours do not focus on a postapartheid horizon but show in painstaking detail how the past has not passed.

For Grunebaum, the reclamation memory work of WECAT and other such projects insists that “collective and individual processes of mourning” must “include … the marking of outrage, identifying and working through internalized forms of degradation, reclaiming … stolen property and unrestituted land.”⁵⁰ Yet this position shows clearly that Grunebaum’s favored form of mourning work—indignant, resistant, and nonforgiving—is not attempting to play a different game from Norval’s (or, for that matter, Tutu’s). Countermemorials are trying to play the game of social consensus and democratic openness differently or better. WECAT, in fact, seems to embody Norval’s notion of democratic innovation, and it trades on the same ideas of aspect change and exemplarity. Townships and slums replace the Robben Island prison and other official memorials of apartheid, but the lesson remains the same: this injustice cannot stand; du mußt dein Leben ändern.

Grunebaum is self-consciously uncritical of countermemory initiatives such as WECAT. As she puts it, “Because these practices represent new and creative interventions … I do not hold the counter-initiatives which I describe for the same critique” as the “TRC process.”⁵¹ Yet the TRC was itself a new and relatively creative intervention, and not just in South Africa since it has established a precedent and a model that has reached into a variety of unexpected places. Grunebaum, perhaps anxious that the subtle capillary ramifications of apartheid will fail to be traced in a rush toward Ubuntu and social harmony, has seemingly split off the “bad breast” of the TRC from the “good breast” of WECAT. The idealized object in turn cannot be criticized, and any pathologies attendant to its practice must be denied or passed over in silence.

Agonists and consensualists, then, seem to be locked in a kind of Sufi whirl, spinning between positions that are individually untenable and that mirror each other’s inadequacies. Consensualism offers a normative vision of reconciliation, intending to motivate personal and political acts of forgiveness that might clear space for new relationships predicated on mutual recognition. Yet this vision risks an idealizing abstraction whereby the living ramifications of the past are split off and denied because they cannot fit into the narrative of social transformation. On the other hand, agonists such as Grunebaum challenge selective discourses of commemoration and recognition while failing to criticize their own, similarly idealized, practices of countermemory. They also neglect the ways in which such alternatives implicitly rely on a desire for recognition that has been denied by hegemonic “regimes of meaning and reference” but might be made possible by different “collective and individual processes of mourning.”⁵²

The South African TRC, in short, traces the edge of the various pathologies of public mourning identified in the preceding chapters. However, TRCs seem to avoid falling fully into a manic form of idealization that would effectively marginalize agonistic voices of resistance. In fact, countermemorial projects such as WECAT are actually more likely to appear in the wake of official processes such as the TRC. Because of its inherent openness traceable to its inclusive, polyvocal performance, the TRC is both a settled, organized space and a social setting that provokes experiences of unsettlement or contestation.⁵³ Polyvocality—if it is listened to—can mitigate romantic hope for reconciliation understood as frictionless belonging, simple unity, or easy forgiveness. Those who expect more than what Leigh Payne calls “contentious coexistence” are set up for disappointment. As Payne puts it, “those anticipating reconciliation, consensus, and an end to human rights violations will find the limited outcomes [of confessional truth processes] … less than satisfactory.”⁵⁴

The “unsettling” experience of contentious coexistence, however, requires a somewhat settled space supported by a commitment to coexistence. In this respect, we come back to the paradoxical idea of the good object—the exemplary entity that, because it gathers an assembly of contentious voices around itself, provides a hedge against the internal excesses of exemplarity. Seen by the light of a Kleinian theory of mourning, truth commissions can be seen as an object, a space, and a practice that, while idealized, also licenses a process of deidealization by which the ongoing conflicts and fissures of democratic societies can be clarified and made subject to social action. From this light, the discourse and practice of reconciliation is irreducible to either an amnesic consensualism or a melancholic and self-contradictory defense of dissensus. As Eric Doxtader and Fanie du Toit argue, the TRC has allowed South African citizens to “neither forsake the project of reconciliation” nor “succumb to unrealistic expectations about its power.”⁵⁵ Doxtader and Du Toit, moreover, conceptualize the “question” of reconciliation as a social good object; it exists “between us” as a precedent, goad, and guide for action.⁵⁶ Viewing TRCs from the perspective of the good object helps us to see how reconciliation processes can “open up a space of contestation” even if their “telos” lies in the dangerous game of consensus.⁵⁷ The good object is desired and disappointing, necessary and problematic, moral and tragic.

Ambivalence is not an eradicable feature of TRCs. The very idea of a truth and reconciliation commission has been described as a concept “at war with itself,” caught between the seemingly exclusive demands of those seeking truth and those counseling reconciliation.⁵⁸ Truth and reconciliation are not obviously mutually reinforcing concepts, either logically or politically. To the contrary, opposition to a TRC process is often linked with an anxiety that acknowledging the truth of past atrocities will make collective life impossible.⁵⁹ The public search for truth involving victim testimony can have an aggressive—if not traumatizing—aspect.⁶⁰ On the other hand, reconciliation, even understood as negative peace, is often achieved only through official declarations of amnesty whereby the agents of violence are given immunity from prosecution for crimes committed during the preceding period.⁶¹ If reconciliation involves amnesty (from the Greek amnestia, meaning “oblivion”), then it is, at best, in tension with any pursuit of truth; in fact, the Greek word for truth, aletheia, could be literally translated as “unforgetting.”

The ambivalence at the heart of TRCs, however, might constitute their greatest promise. Commissions can offer a public gathering place where marginalized or suppressed accounts of the past are recognized and integrated into accounts of collective history.⁶² Truth commissions have a perhaps unique ability to not only describe particular events but to investigate and reveal broader social patterns and contexts that made traumatic events possible in the first place. Insofar as TRCs promote public reflection on violent or traumatic events in a polity’s past and present, they simultaneously promote the idea that such reflection is a necessary component of democratic politics and identity. Although no report will eliminate all competing interpretations of history, they can serve, in Michael Ignatieff’s phrasing, to “reduce the number of lies.”⁶³ By countering current and often heavily distorted frames of the events, TRCs can articulate a public “universe of comprehensibility” that can serve as the basis for the mutual adjustment of competing versions of the past.⁶⁴ In weaving together different narratives of the same event, TRCs contest idealized versions of the past and present while disappointing desires for easy consensus or coexistence.

Among critics of the SATRC, Robert Meister seems the most sensitive to its inherent ambivalence. Meister echoes other TRC critics such as Grunebaum and Mamdani when he argues that the discourse of reconciliation amounts to little more than sentimental humanitarianism, which has supplanted revolutionary struggles and aspirations with moralistic bromides about forgiveness and coexistence. According to Meister, sentimental humanitarianism reflects a broader, transnational movement in the post-1989 world through which universalistic claims surrounding human rights have displaced social justice struggles. Human rights culture, as Meister reads it, is “no longer addressed to victims who would become revolutionaries but to beneficiaries who do not identify with perpetrators.”⁶⁵ The SATRC embodies this shift by recasting “the central dyads of revolutionary political thought … as … ethical relations among surviving witnesses to human cruelty.”⁶⁶ Yet in doing so the TRC has forsaken claims for structural reform that were at the root of decades of ANC resistance. The discourse of reconciliation substitutes ethical categories of forgiveness for political categories of injustice and therefore displaces the need for continued political struggle—for the rejection, rather than the acceptance, of the neoliberal postpolitical order.⁶⁷

The newly developing social consensus around the idea that the apartheid past was evil, Meister argues, was purchased through a discourse of reconciliation that sees evil as past. The price of reconciliation is a manic amnesia/amnesty that draws a line between past and present and therefore disavows the capillary ramifications that reach across this divide. For Meister, claims that evil is past rest on practices of “mock reparation,” in which the collection of victim testimony and meager reparative efforts are undertaken while efforts to make structural changes to the South African economy and society are postponed—perhaps indefinitely. Mock reparative efforts speak the language of justice but in so doing they isolate contemporary social configurations from historical patterns of misrecognition. Mock reparation also draws a line between “reconciled” and “unreconciled” victims. Unreconciled victims—who refuse to grant legitimacy to the new system—are marginalized by a discourse that looks forward, not backward; they are seen as melancholic holdouts or relics who cannot countenance the new social arrangement. Beneficiaries and “reconciled” victims, on the other hand, can step into the space of a new social order, united by their common rejection of the historical violence of apartheid. However, these fantasies of splitting only serve to deny ongoing social problems and their root in structures of misrecognition and to stigmatize ongoing critical resistance.

Once again, however, Meister is sensitive to the ambivalent or paradoxical nature of reconciliation in ways that the TRC’s most vociferous critics often are not. The paradox, as Meister presents it, is that the discourse of human rights represents both a political ideology that can displace real grievances and postpone a search for social justice, and a plausible ethicopolitical standpoint because it acknowledges “the pathological guilt of victimhood, which stands in the way of recovery.”⁶⁸ Agonistic doubts about the limits of reconciliation can ossify into a reactive pessimism that denies any actual social progress and rejects on principle the search for mechanisms of such improvement. The revolutionary project of social justice in turn becomes incorporated as a pristine object of attachment, feeding a kind of leftist melancholia.⁶⁹ For Meister, the salient question, then, is not how one can carry forward the revolutionary struggle at all costs, but how one can reconcile the legitimacy of the fight for justice with the “moral attitudes that make it possible (and legitimate) to stop” the fight; that is, how to create new social practices and spaces in such a way that struggles for justice can relinquish the idealized object of revolution without falling into the traps of a fantastical consensualism that agrees on past evil only by manically asserting that all evil is past?⁷⁰

Meister’s question sharply expresses the paradox of public mourning that has motivated this project. How can the struggle for social justice and recognition avoid the dead ends of wounded identity or melancholia, and how can social practices of responding to traumas of misrecognition avoid manic forms of denial? As previous chapters have argued, the challenge in confronting this paradox is to conceptualize mourning in ways that resist a befogged sentimentalism that obscures ongoing conflict or disagreements, but that also acknowledges the potential spaces and practices by which communities and citizens can bend social norms and narratives in a more inclusive, democratic direction. The discourse and practice of truth and reconciliation—from South Africa to Greensboro—helps to concretize these ideas.

Meister uses the work of Klein to argue that regnant discourses of human rights offer “mock” forms of reparation and that discourses of reconciliation often split victims into idealized and demonized (or “unreconciled”) categories. Mock reparation and discourses of splitting serve to marginalize political struggles for justice in the name of an ethical coming-together of reconciled victims and former regretful beneficiaries. For Meister, Klein helps to unpack the cognitive-affective defenses that are intertwined with these discourses and practices of reconciliation. Yet Meister does not go far enough with Klein; according to him, Klein’s account of integration cannot “provide a viable alternative to the pursuit of social justice.”⁷¹ Although this claim might be reasonable on its face, Meister does not entertain the possibility that Klein’s work could form the kernel of an alternative conceptualization of the means and mode of this pursuit. Klein’s ideas of the good object, the depressive position, and the ongoing work of mourning—along with Winnicott’s notion of potential space—help us to make sense of the ambivalence of the discourse and practice of reconciliation in South Africa and elsewhere. Klein was not a political thinker, but we can and must, I argue, use Klein to think politically. Klein and Winnicott help us to see the promise of truth and reconciliation practices in light of the democratic work of mourning, by which their consensualist and agonistic moments are seen as simultaneous narratives that must draw on and learn from each other if the dead ends of wounded identity and amnesia are to be avoided.

Because TRCs are organized by democratic norms of facing up to violent events in a polity’s history, they allow for marginalized voices and experiences to challenge dominant understandings of the past and to complicate the identities and attachments based on that history. Truth and reconciliation commissions carry many of the dangers associated with consensualist mourning rituals—the temptation to embellish the lost object, to split off its discomforting features (often in the interests of scapegoating and demonization), to aestheticize the loss and the community of the bereft, and to replace conflict in the past with a depoliticizing discourse of consensus or unity in the present. Yet because TRCs necessarily involve multiple speakers and motives and because they consist of opposed memories and accounts of the past, they are essentially ambivalent objects that provide a measure of resistance to consensualist fantasies. Like the tragic festival at Athens, TRCs can “represent the polis to itself” by displaying the fissures and conflicts within the polity’s past and present. They do more than this, however, because they carve out and offer up a public space for working through these fissures.

We can see how this might work by reflecting on how a process like the SATRC—organized by ambivalent ideas such as justice, truth, and reconciliation—has provoked a searching, critical, public conversation about these terms both in South Africa and beyond. Contestation takes place not only over “justice”—coded alternately as punishment, retribution, reparation, restitution, forgiveness, cohabitation, tolerance, restoration, healing, or recognition—but over “truth” and “reconciliation” as well.⁷² These terms become problematized within the process of a TRC—their various meanings are put on display as participants identify points of conflict and disagreement. Such processes seem to be inherently frustrating, yet frustration has a political value; it can help to mitigate cognitive dogmatism and create the basis for dialogue and mutual acceptance.⁷³ In other words, truth and reconciliation processes do not represent an inevitable script so much as a Winnicottian potential space, which can be created and re-created by its direct participants. As Pablo de Grieff argues, transitional justice processes such as TRCs enable “spaces where identities can be tried out, including the identity of a rights claimant.”⁷⁴ Just as transitional objects stretch between familiar and unfamiliar worlds, TRCs can provide liminal experiences in which individuals can take up new roles, achieve new levels of standing, and try out new forms of agency.

Because of their inherent tensions and frustrations, truth commissions have the potential to pry open public space for broadscale discursive contestation over the meaning of the past and its continued presence within collective memory and identity.⁷⁵ Episodes of contestation, in turn, can have significant ripple effects as part of the work of cultivating depressive forms of agency and building democratic culture. These ripple effects following from the commission should be seen as just as important as its original performance.⁷⁶ For instance, Priscilla Hayner recalls the story of a sugar-producing concern in South Africa that was asked to participate in the TRC’s sectoral hearings on the business community. The company undertook an internal review of its record under the apartheid regime, which resulted in its own unexpected—and unexpectedly political—modes of conversation: “The first meeting was very intense: we spent an hour and a half just on what to call each other; we weren’t supposed to say ‘black,’ which is what the whites thought, but rather ‘African.’ We wanted to call those of Indian descent ‘Asiatic,’ but they said ‘No, call us Indian.’ Thus we came to understand, ‘black’ included African, Indian, and coloured. We’d never talked about this before, nor talked about the past.”⁷⁷

Such microlevel conversations and engagements are an essential part of building a democratic culture of contentious coexistence, and their potential significance should not be understated. Take, as a more impactful example, the story of the Solms-Delta winery in the Cape region of South Africa. Mark Solms, a sixth-generation landholder in the area, decided in the early 2000s to turn his family’s landholdings into a wine estate. The Cape region is the heart of South Africa’s $3 billion wine industry, an industry that was historically built through centuries of slavery, indentured servitude, legal discrimination, and exploitation. In a social climate charged by the public work of the SATRC, however, Solms decided that his venture into winemaking should also be a venture into the history and living present of the reverberating traumas of slavery and apartheid. Among the first new employees on the wine estate were archaeologists, who began to excavate the area. They quickly uncovered evidence of precolonial communities whose ways of life had been buried by centuries of expropriation and exploitation. Joining the archaeologists were teams of historians, who helped compile evidence of what life had been like in the area for the generations of the slave and indentured laborers who had for centuries toiled the rich countryside but had reaped none of its riches themselves.

The result of these excavations was the Van de Caab Museum at the Solms-Delta estate. The museum shows the interconnected history of the wine industry and practices of slavery and legal discrimination. The goal, as Solms put it, was to “counteract the picture-postcard view” of the Cape region and its prized industry.⁷⁸ As Solms notes, “slavery was absolutely fundamental to the working and building of all these farms, and we’re still living with the consequences today … the owners are always rich and white, and the workers are poor and brown, and that stems from slavery.”⁷⁹ Everyday objects in the area are stained by the history of enslavement—antique bell towers that compose the backdrop of so many tourist photographs, for example, rang for decades to call slaves to their daily labors—and current patterns of wealth and social well-being are the living legacies of these historical inequalities. Because of the Van de Caab Museum, however, current workers on the estate can discover and relive the history of their predecessors and ancestors. In and of itself, this is a powerful means of documenting abuses of the past and creating a space for critique about these abuses. For instance, while exploring an excavated site of the estate, a farmworker lifted a stone tool and addressed Solms for the first time: “You see, professor, my people were here before yours. How come I work for you?”⁸⁰

In part because of the difficult questions made possible by the potential space of the Van de Caab Museum (itself licensed, at least in part, by the good object of the SATRC), the work of historical excavation and critique proved to be only the first step in an unfolding process of social rearrangement at Solms-Delta. In partnership with a neighbor, Solms secured a loan that allowed the farmworkers to purchase a one-third share in the estate. The creation of a worker-owned cooperative is itself remarkable in an industry that has just 1 percent black ownership (in a country where blacks make up 80 percent of the population) and in which workers continue to suffer from meager wages, poor housing, and low safety standards.⁸¹ The cooperative in turn led to the establishment of the Wijn de Caab Trust, which provides estate workers with upgraded housing, health and dental benefits, a full-time social worker, and afterschool tutors. The single biggest allocation from the trust has gone toward improved educational opportunities for both adult farmworkers and their children, but other successful ventures include a vibrant music program called Music van de Caab. The music program was inaugurated through interviews with local musicians and academic research into the history of traditional Cape music styles. There are now four bands on the farm, including an eighty-person marching band. Since 2008, there has also been an annual harvest festival at which the variety of local musical styles blend together as people gather to celebrate the cultural heritage of the Cape—a heritage involving love and murder, cooperation and exploitation, stunning beauty and the ugliest forms of violence. What makes the example of the Solms-Delta estate so compelling is that the good and bad aspects of this history are expressly held together in an honest and open manner.

Each of the concrete actions undertaken by the Solms family and the estate workers is an acknowledgement of interconnectivity and an example of depressive agency. Workers are involved at all levels of production on the estate (including cultural production) and build equity from their labors. As Solms put it, the principles of shared agency stem from the awareness that “our fates are inextricably linked to each other … we must recognize our mutual needs and find a way they can be met.”⁸² What the experience of Solms-Delta shows is that the democratic work of mourning begins with, but soon must exceed, the work of memorialization. The labor of democratic mourning shows up in concrete efforts to create the conditions for mutual recognition, and the ramifying changes in the Cape region show that such efforts can gain traction in the most difficult of contexts. Obstacles to this work—external and internal—are of course legion. Most of the neighboring farms and estates in the area have shifted from an attitude of bemusement toward one of hostility. As Solms put it, “many farmers find my point of view treasonous,” and Solms and his partners have received death threats.⁸³ Yet there was also internal resistance to collaboration and shared agency. When Solms first broached the idea of a cooperative model to the estate’s workers, he was met with stiff opposition and incredulity. As he put it, “I felt the impossibility of communicating. I didn’t understand it.”⁸⁴ The creation of communication across stark divides reinforced by centuries of expropriation and mistrust required repeated listening sessions in which Solms and the workers slowly began to erode old patterns of interaction and create a new vocabulary of collaboration. From those sessions, Solms learned that his initial approach had been rejected as the vainglory of another white “messiah” who would “save” the poor, benighted workers.⁸⁵ The listening sessions created, then, in Winnicott’s terms, a potential space in which the “messiah” owner and the “grateful” workers could slip out of their symbolically loaded subject positions and develop new forms of communication about their intertwined lives. The difficult work of building a more democratic community required that Solms acknowledge not only his family’s complicity in the living legacies of slavery and apartheid, but also acknowledge his personal complicity in a subject position of the white messiah, which further entrenched distrust and made communication impossible. Playing within this space, however, enabled new relationships and forms of agency. Perhaps it is no coincidence or small matter, then, that Solms is also a psychoanalyst.

It could be argued that the Solms-Delta estate is an exceptional and marginal experience in a country still characterized by significant differences between haves and have-nots. Some might argue that it is actually less of an exemplar than a distraction from the kinds of large-scale, revolutionary projects that would be necessary to make South Africa a more equal, just, and democratic society. Yet I would argue that it is precisely because they started “small” that the worker-owners on the Solms estate have been able to build something of democratic value in their community. The efforts have focused on the “human-scale” work of building relationships and democratic culture—traditions of education, music, food, and culture that do not exclude a painful history but operate in tandem with a work of memorialization regarding that history. The South African TRC, while not often explicitly invoked by workers or Solms, is a persistent, haunting presence behind these efforts—a good object that licensed an examination of a painful history and helped to create the conditions for a series of concrete rejoinders.

As the example of the Solms-Delta winery shows, then, TRCs have the capacity to catalyze practices of social learning and civic action aimed at preventing future episodes of mass violence or interrupting entrenched patterns of misrecognition.⁸⁶ As James Gibson has shown in his studies of the SATRC, the creation of a broad, public means of accounting for the past has led to some significant shifts in social perspectives.⁸⁷ The inclusive, public, and participatory nature of the TRC was an essential aspect of this work. By including a multitude of voices and experiences, TRCs promote an inclusive form of public participation through which more citizens can imagine themselves into the process and feel “ownership” over it.⁸⁸ The decision to eschew strictly legal proceedings had the consequence of allowing ordinary South Africans to engage with the process.⁸⁹ Empirical studies have demonstrated that the public and participatory nature of the South African TRC—because it “captured the attention of ordinary people”—was what made possible large-scale perspective change within South African society.⁹⁰

Yet it is important not to overstate or to read in purely consensualist terms the aspect changes in South Africa inaugurated by the TRC. The reconciliation heralded by such processes is less a collective form of healing or forgiveness than the possibility of ongoing interactions across social divides through which democratic norms and practices might extend and deepen their reach. As Doxtader puts it, “far less than redemption, reconciliation interrupts the historical justifications for endless conflict in the name of fostering argumentation that affords enemies an occasion to begin the task of debating how to best make history.”⁹¹ Reducible to neither an Antigonean politics of agonism nor a Periclean politics of mourning, the work of reconciliation is best approached in terms of the ongoing—and ultimately endless—democratic work of mourning.

In the next section, I return to the place where this book started—Greensboro, North Carolina, and its complex recent history of trauma and mourning—in order to continue to think concretely about what this work of mourning could look like and what it might offer to communities and citizens in their pursuit of an imperfectly perfectible democracy. Once again, the work of TRCs during their official existence is perhaps less important than the work that citizens do with the ideas of truth and reconciliation. The ripple effects of such commissions involve (unpredictable) moments of depressive agency in which social actors take up the living legacies of a traumatic past and engage in collaborative exercises of social repair. As the example of Greensboro demonstrates, these ripple effects are not limited to a wine estate in the Cape region of South Africa.

Greensboro’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Mourning in America

Truth and reconciliation commissions have, by and large, been exceptional events in a nation’s history, usually occurring during moments of political transition or at the end of periods of civil strife. But there is nothing inherent in the form that limits it to these exceptional or liminal moments. Perhaps, then, the work of these commissions should be seen less in terms of a discrete, bounded process and more in terms of a society’s ongoing struggle for democratic recognition. Hence the value of Greensboro and the GTRC. As the first such commission in the United States, it has challenged the assumption that these processes are exceptional by their nature. The very appearance of a truth and reconciliation process in Greensboro usefully overturned several established myths and assumptions about such practices. It demonstrated, for instance, that the process is not restricted to transitional societies emerging from periods of intense civil conflict or war. The citizens of Greensboro moreover demonstrated—in the words of a South African TRC commissioner—that “many so-called stable democracies have a number of skeletons in their closets … [that] there are several historical acts of national shame [in these countries] that will not go away until the wounds are cut open and addressed.”⁹² Finally, as a grassroots campaign organized, financed, and operated through nonstate agencies, the GTRC demonstrated that everyday citizens and civil society groups could authorize a respected and serious examination of traumatic events in a community’s past without the official sanction or support of the state.

The GTRC looked to other experiments with truth and reconciliation and relied on resources within the growing sphere of nonprofit transitional justice organizations, yet this should not detract from the unique and innovative nature of this rooted, local process. As an “unofficial truth project,” the GTRC had limited powers to compel participation and no direct means of changing official policies in response to its findings.⁹³ Yet despite—or perhaps because of—these origins, the commission was able to heighten social awareness of racial disagreements and distrust and to contest elite-driven accounts of civil rights progress.⁹⁴ As a local-level, community-organized process, the GTRC provoked a broader reaction in the community that an official process would likely have failed to generate—especially because one of the main topics of the commission’s work was the historical distrust between certain largely African American neighborhoods and public institutions in Greensboro.

Unexpectedly, the process of creating a TRC in Greensboro met with stiff resistance. Even the proposal of a commission revealed points of tensions and conflict. For example, advocacy for and resistance to the GTRC tracked largely along racial lines. This is not altogether unsurprising, given both the immediate and more-distant history of racial disparities and distrust in the South. The labor activist Si Kahn, in his testimony to the GTRC, noted that if you “scratch the surface of any issue in the South … you will find race.”⁹⁵ As discussed in chapter 1, Greensboro has a prominent place in the history of the mid-twentieth-century struggle for civil rights because it was the site of the first widely publicized lunch-counter sit-in in February 1960. White progressives in the South often saw the city as a model for moderate race relations, as the “city of civil rights.”⁹⁶ Yet while it is true, for instance, that Greensboro was the first city to announce that it would comply with the Supreme Court’s desegregation order in Brown v. Board of Education, it was also one of the last cities in the South to actually act in accordance with federal desegregation orders.⁹⁷ Comforting illusions surrounding norms of “civility” and moderation cultivated what William Chafe has called a “progressive mystique,” which obscured a violent social reality not all that different from other cities throughout the former states of the Confederacy. Moreover, the emphasis on “civil” speech often enforced silence over uncivil or traumatic realities, and the events of November 3, 1979, were no exception. As Allen Johnson, an editor of Greensboro’s most widely circulated newspaper, put it, “Greensboro has trouble talking about things; Greensboro likes to talk about good stuff … Greensboro does not like to talk about bad stuff.”⁹⁸

The GTRC put pressure on these consensualist norms and narratives, which led to some intense moments of cognitive dissonance. The city council, for instance, voted along racial lines against official involvement. One white council member explained her vote by arguing that racial divisions no longer existed in Greensboro—apparently oblivious to the fact that the vote in which she had just participated had revealed a stark racial division among the city’s official representatives.⁹⁹ The impact of this vote was profound. The racial split served to validate commission advocates’ insistence that the traumas of the Greensboro Massacre had a vibrant afterlife in the city (coated by a thick layer of denial), and it gave the process a deeper legitimacy among those community members who distrusted official institutions.¹⁰⁰

As the process developed, additional fractures and fissures came into view, even within the group of TRC advocates and participants. It became apparent, for instance, that white participants often emphasized “reconciliation,” whereas black supporters maintained that the purpose of the TRC was “truth.”¹⁰¹ The commission itself was internally divided by these competing priorities, but the GTRC’s capacious mandate helped to facilitate repeated discussions about these issues both within and beyond its circle of supporters. The process of creating and operating a TRC in Greensboro, then, like the tragic festival of Athens, represented the polis to itself, complete with its most significant fractures and lines of division. Yet it also made possible painful conversations about those fractures. The fundamental ambivalence of the polity was reflected back into public space, creating a dissonance that could not be quickly or without remainder subsumed under a principle of unity. Although these divisions were certainly known by many of Greensboro’s citizens, they did not typically break into broader public consciousness because they were policed by norms of civility and broadly held assumptions of slow-yet-steady progress (and because Greensboro—like many cities and communities—lacks public space and precedent for these kinds of conversations).

Norms such as civility serve a psychopolitical function. They betray an anxious fear of loss (and subsequent duty of mourning) that would arise should the idealized object prove to be implicated in a history of violent persecution or misrecognition. As Lisa Magarrell and Joya Wesley put it, opposition to the GTRC stemmed in part from the sense that “something held dear to individual and community self-image might have to be given up if a new narrative was to be told.”¹⁰² The melancholic defense of an idealized “civil” or “moderate” Greensboro, which could never be implicated in the ugly violence of the Klan or the radical agitation of the CWP, formed a subterranean layer of resistance to the work of the commission. But the life and the afterlife of the commission have shown that while something (the ideal object) had to be lost, something by that very process could also be gained (the good object, which is neither manically idealized nor requires a corollary process of denial and demonization). For Klein, once again, mourning only takes place insofar as part objects are relinquished and the whole object is internalized. The internalized, ambivalent object forms the kernel of an internal assembly that pushes aside the consolatory company of one-sided objects of pure hatred or unblemished love.

Democratic mourning is performed by describing not only the actual traumatic event, but also by revealing the broader cultural and political contexts that made such an event possible in the first place. By acknowledging these broader social patterns—living legacies of racial discrimination and durable patterns of poverty, police abuse, and social distrust—the GTRC problematized bystander innocence and identified sins of omission as well as commission. Once again, this process is consistent with Iris Marion Young’s recommendation to shift from a liability to a social connection model of justice when dealing with complicated structural situations of injustice or misrecognition. Acknowledging a broader context for the event challenged the dominant account in Greensboro that had alienated the source of the trauma from the “real” community. This process of alienation resembles a paranoid-schizoid defense of splitting, whereby violence is attributed only to outsiders. In Greensboro, this strategy took the form of othering not only the Klan members—seen as “relics” of an earlier time—but demonizing the CWP and GAPP as “outside agitators” who had invaded the sleepy mill town only to stir up trouble.¹⁰³ Within the official civic cover story, the events of November 3 were framed as a “shootout” between two equally repugnant groups that had “nothing to do with Greensboro.”¹⁰⁴ Mark Sills, one of the GTRC commissioners, reflected on the persistence of this myth:

The city managed through the press to completely distance itself from the event and pretend it never happened, which is why we needed this Commission in the first place … I gave a talk to a church recently about our work and I had people raising their hands and saying, “we thought these were all outsiders and you’re telling us that these folks had been living in this community and working in this community and were a part of this community. We’ve been here all of our lives and no one’s ever told us this before. We thought they were all outsiders.”¹⁰⁵

An institution such as the GTRC goes some distance toward showing the indigenous quality of traumatic events—to show, despite their appearance as exogenous shocks, a connection to the mundane habits and patterns of behavior that surround and penetrate the life of the community.¹⁰⁶ The GTRC Final Report contained a particularly powerful example of spatial implication with an imaginative transposition of the events via racial reversal:

Imagine for a moment that these elements [of the event] would have been racially reversed, viewed as a photographic negative. Imagine a group of demonstrators is holding a demonstration against black terrorism in the affluent white community of Irving Park. A caravan of armed black terrorists is allowed to drive unobstructed to the parade starting point, and photos are taken by the police as demonstrators are shot dead. Most of the cars are then allowed to flee the scene, unpursued, even as they threaten neighborhood pedestrians by pointing shotguns through the windows. The defendants are tried and acquitted by an all-black jury. The first shots—fired by the blacks screaming “Shoot the Crackers!” and “Show me a Cracker with guts and I’ll show you a black man with a gun!”—are described by black defense attorneys and accepted by jurors as “calming shots.” Meanwhile, the city government takes steps to block citizen protest of black terrorist violence including a curfew in the white neighborhood.”¹⁰⁷

By staging these moments of reversal and recognition, the GTRC offered a tragic perspective on the events, making for a “difficult” history that could not be reduced to slogans about the city of civil rights.¹⁰⁸ In Greensboro, public testimonies during the operation of the commission, public hearings and dialogues surrounding the release of the final report, and subsequent scattered events have opened up a dialogic space within the community that did not exist before the commission began its work. By implicating citizens in a violent past, TRCs like the GTRC make it harder to appropriate this past for a flat or dogmatic version of collective identity in the present. A public process like the GTRC can break down not only a simplified account of history but also simplified accounts of group (and individual) identity based on this history, preparing the ground for dialogue across lines of conflict and tension.¹⁰⁹ The commission was a public object of reflection that carved out social space for conversation and contestation over the past and present of the city.

The GTRC, in Klein’s terms, can be seen as a good object of identification that mitigated persecutory defenses of splitting, denial, and demonization, and challenged circuits of collective identification based on a romanticized version of history. The good object, first integrated under paranoid-schizoid pressures, later becomes the center or “focal point” of the integrated ego.¹¹⁰ The integrated ego is able to bear the poignant conflict of the circulating assembly of objects within its internal and external worlds. On this basis, the integrated ego is increasingly tolerant of the complexities and unevenness of its internal and external objects and experiences.¹¹¹ The good object conjoins a search for integration and understanding with a tragic awareness of the native fractiousness and ambivalence within and between selves. The tragic and the moral coexist under the reign of the good. In similar fashion, I have been arguing that the agonistic insistence on political contestation and the dangerous game of social consensus can be brought together within an ongoing democratic work of mourning as exemplified by the GTRC. Just as some citizens in Greensboro had to give up “something dearly held,” agonism and consensualism both have to relinquish the idealized objects at their core—the agonist insistence on fundamental antagonism and bottomless resistance, and the consensualist fiction of a unanimous assembly. The democratic learning represented by the GTRC shows that agonism and consensualism can and must coexist if pernicious forms of denial are to be effectively challenged and overcome. Ed Whitfield, a local activist associated with broad-based organizing in North Carolina, personally embodied this possibility of social learning and change. Although initially skeptical of the process, Whitfield came to see it as an important means of what he called “chipping away at a lie”:

I think it’s all connected with a deeper story that is in the minds of most people—the kind of common narrative about what this country is about, in both its opportunities and its responsibilities. There’s a narrative that I think leaves much to be desired … that’s why truth processes strike me as being useful movements from the standpoint of what I’m concerned with, which is social justice. It’s not just about telling the truth … it’s about chipping away at a lie that I think prevents people from reaching their full potential in terms of their relationships with each other and even in terms of their growth individually as we’re all out here engaged in a process of creating meaning in our lives.¹¹²

Truth and reconciliation commissions can reflect the ambivalence of the polity’s past and present—the deeply unsettling or tragic aspects existing within any political tradition—yet they can do so in part because they are organized by aspirational norms of social coherence and democratic recognition.¹¹³ TRCs create a holding environment in which crisscrossing interpretations of a community’s values can interact and collide; they are a potential space because these interactions can lead to unpredictable outcomes and perhaps even the development of new vocabularies. In this respect, they are a different type of political space than either a protest march or a city council meeting. Instead they are more like a crossroads. A crossroads does not imply difference or unity so much as interconnection, uncertainty, and choice (or agency).

TRCs best fulfill this public-making function when they promote broad citizen engagement, facilitating the creation of an ambivalent and polyvocal narrative and allowing more citizens to imagine themselves into the process, which promotes ownership of the difficult past across a broad spectrum of the population. This does not replace agonism but places agonistic voices es meson—in the public for contestation. For instance, in one of the GTRC’s public hearings a representative from the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations, Richard Koritz, argued, “the powerless … cannot be reconciled to the powerful—not without a fight.” As Koritz finished his testimony, one of the commissioners thanked him for his words and noted that his (agonistic) perspective “wouldn’t [have been] heard … were it not for this process.”¹¹⁴

The GTRC created a public space for a more capacious, fractious, and less idealized version of the city’s history within which more citizens could locate their experiences, even as they also were compelled by the process to reckon with other, unfamiliar experiences. For instance, the Woolworth’s sit-in and similar, early civil rights–era activities had in many respects become consensual objects of attachment for Greensboro, whereas the events of November 3 were seen as aberrations to be downplayed or forgotten. By “facing shameful events honestly” and “lifting up this painful truth” about the events of November 1979, the commission hoped to more fully examine a “difficult chapter of Greensboro’s history.”¹¹⁵ After the GTRC, the simplistic and stereotype-infused accounts of this event could not survive unchallenged. Empirical studies have correspondingly shown that, in the wake of the GTRC, elite-driven narratives of the Greensboro Massacre (for instance, the framing of the event as a “shootout”) have lost some of their power.¹¹⁶ The GTRC eroded the community cover story in part by revealing how the audience of a Periclean oration can talk back and develop a richer, more inclusive, and less amnesic story of civic life.

As a grassroots campaign involving ordinary citizens, the GTRC facilitated public engagement in ways that an official commission may not have been capable of doing—especially given levels of distrust toward public officials in the city. In this respect, the public nature of the GTRC proceedings—its visible presence in the community for a period of several years and its afterlife through follow-up public events—was just as important as the content of its final report. GTRC participants who were interviewed several years after the commission ended expressed both positive and negative assessments of the event. As one participant put it, the GTRC was “flawed but important.”¹¹⁷ Participants saw the open and inclusive process as “frustrating” since other participants “were saying things that I disagreed with,” yet many also saw this frustration as a source of the GTRC’s value because it went “beyond us.”¹¹⁸ Almost all of the participants viewed the commission as a moment or piece of a larger process of reconciliation or social recognition; it was a “really powerful first step” and a “first tiny step in a bigger process.”¹¹⁹ The democratic work of mourning, they might agree, is ongoing.

The GTRC was a multivocal civic process of working through that cannot be reduced to the terms of either agonism or consensualism. The process was framed by democratic norms and commitments that aspire to universal relevance within the (dangerous) game of consensus, but in this respect, I argue, it represents a Kleinian good object that, once internalized, licenses and creates space for public reflection on the shortcomings of those commitments. In other words, the partial idealization of the TRC is, paradoxically, what enables a salutary (and often agonistic) process of deidealization that clarifies historical and enduring social traumas. The good object, like the GTRC, is flawed but necessary. The GTRC offered a common narrative to which citizens can appeal as they address the problems of the city, but it also created a space where the contested nature of that process could be acknowledged.

Once again, Klein was not a political thinker, but we can use Klein to think politically. From this perspective the challenge is not to overcome agonistic voices of contestation but to filter them through a depressive awareness of whole object relations and the ambivalence within self, other, and world. The democratic work of mourning suggests the hope that past wrongs or traumas will be (more) openly and honestly discussed, without the presence of overwhelming bitterness or resentment, but it does not pretend that tragedies of social misrecognition can be finally surmounted or healed. To pretend so would be to fall into fantasies of omnipotence that keep us from the ongoing work of social and psychic integration. In this respect the democratic work of mourning is a commitment to addressing and working through particular traumas of misrecognition without pretending that social conflict as such can be transcended. As the GTRC Final Report puts it, the goal is to “take us some distance from half-truths, misunderstandings, myth, and hurtful interpretations,” not to take us all the way to a beloved community.¹²⁰ The effect of these conjoined efforts in the case of Greensboro is that the traumatic event has now been situated in a political, social, and economic context such that distancing myths and defense mechanisms lose (some of) their power. The GTRC was able to erode the common narrative that had split off the Greensboro Massacre and the painful traumas of social misrecognition that formed the context in which the event took place.

Just as important, however, as the work of the Greensboro commission during its eighteen months of operation might be its democratic ripple effects within and beyond the city. Although the commission’s formal recommendations have been largely neglected by city officials, the GTRC energized a variety of grassroots movements for social change in Greensboro, helped catalyze a regional alliance for racial reconciliation, and has inspired similar grassroots TRCs in places as different as Michigan and Maine. In Greensboro, multiple associations came to life through the community outreach events following the publication of the GTRC Final Report, including a minimum wage campaign, an affordable housing alliance, and an alternative currency project.¹²¹ Although some of these efforts proved short-lived, the activists engaged in those associations have gone on to other efforts, including a local antiracism association.¹²² None of these associations has proved to be as impactful or as long lasting as the Solms-Delta estate, but like that example they testify to the ever-present potential for public action as a rejoinder to social trauma. Beyond the city of Greensboro, the GTRC inspired a regional Alliance for Truth and Racial Reconciliation, which provides an online gathering space for over twenty similar, local truth-gathering processes, sponsors conferences on racial reconciliation, and offers curriculum guides on race and civil rights.

The GTRC’s biggest impact, however, might be far outside the former states of the Confederacy. Greensboro has become an example and a rallying cry for citizens motivated to examine and address local injustices or traumas of misrecognition. For instance, the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion, a nonprofit based in Detroit, organized a TRC surrounding the legacies of racial segregation and discrimination in Detroit and the surrounding metro area. In the state of Maine, the Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission was inaugurated in February 2013. The Maine commission is tasked with investigating and publicizing the historical persecution of native tribes in the area, including repeated episodes of forced relocation in which native children were taken from tribal areas to be raised in white homes. It is too early to tell what additional ripple effects such processes might inspire within these particular communities, but it is clear that the most powerful—and democratic—lesson of the GTRC is that citizens can organize around themes of truth and reconciliation in ways that can reshape the social circuitry of recognition and misrecognition. The effects of these actions are unpredictable—as is democratic action more generally speaking—but these events show how public processes of mourning can cultivate “depressive” modes of agency in which power is pluralized and extended beyond official institutions.¹²³

The GTRC was a potential space that enabled communication and mediation that—while falling far short of social harmony—helped clarify the differences and fissures within and between the citizens of Greensboro. As the executive director of the GTRC, Jill Williams, argued, the process “opened up a space in which even the most privileged in town were engaged—willingly or not—in a dialogue about race and class disparities.”¹²⁴ Just as within the South African example, it is these conversations and their unpredictable aftereffects that represent the greatest promise of a democratic work of mourning. The reverberations from the event are relatively faint, but clearly Greensboro has become a precedent and an opportunity for thinking about concrete practices of social recognition and repair—not only in the city but far afield.

Conclusion

The experience of Greensboro helps us to think about the democratic work of mourning as an ongoing practice within communities marked by historical and enduring traumas of misrecognition. Learning from Greensboro, it seems crucial to cultivate political practices and spaces of mourning that invite a plurality of voices into the process, not based on the premise that these voices can be subsumed within an all-encompassing consensus narrative of the past or on the agonistic idea that a clash of wills can yield a new hegemonic articulation through a coalitional chain of equivalences. Public engagement on traumas of misrecognition is precarious, difficult, and unpredictable, but it can take place on the common ground created by good objects such as the GTRC. An appreciation of this precariousness and ambivalence would emphasize that the democratic value of the TRC process is not limited to its provision of a more complete account of the past but extends to its ability to cultivate a capacious perspective that keeps the essential complexity and contestability of these accounts in public view. Such an emphasis, moreover, seems to capture best the “truth” about the TRC process—namely, that it is not reconciliatory or redemptive in the ways often described. Instead of social closure or redemptive healing, then, perhaps we should see public mourning processes more in the terms of the South African journalist Rian Malan—as a process of “annihilating certainties” in order to create space and agency through which individuals and communities can pick up the pieces and begin again. TRCs are not magic salves for democratic problems. In fact, the experience of a TRC—and Greensboro is no exception—seems to be inherently frustrating to almost all participants. Yet once again, perhaps this frustration or disappointment is one of the most important features of these processes because it can disrupt habits of projective identification, denial, and omnipotence and can open up space for the development of new vocabularies and repertoires of response.

It can do this. The conditional must be emphasized, given the simultaneous emphasis on tragedy that must accompany an aspirational democratic morality. The democratic work of mourning is precarious because we are always susceptible to amnesic narratives of the past that intersect with psychological mechanisms of self-deception. The reconciliation offered by TRCs, then, is not a terminable process of reaching unanimity or consensus. It should be viewed, rather, in the words of GTRC Commissioner Cynthia Brown, as an interminable process of “putting ourselves in places with people that we have disagreements with.”¹²⁵ Doing so often pulls apart or shatters our certainties and self-perceptions, yet by seeing conflict as chronic, we can discover better ways of living with it—ways that mitigate the denial and splitting that feed a politics of demonization and paranoia.¹²⁶ The democratic work of mourning is the search for coherence and recognition amid ongoing disagreements and misrecognitions, carried out in part through these disagreements. The consensualism of Pericles and the agonism of Antigone can enliven one another under the reign of a Kleinian good object and within the potential spaces created and re-created by citizens through a public work of mourning. This is a “splintering and shattering” activity that can be borne by a community aware of its fractures and fault lines, and the process of facing down these differences can in turn give birth to a better integrated community marked by spaces of mediation in which this fractious integration can be repeatedly formed, contested, and reformed over time.

Freud once wrote that, in order to avoid a painful process of self-examination, societies turn what is “disagreeable” into “what is untrue.”¹²⁷ Yet if this were a timeless truth of social and psychic life, then we would not know the Greek experience of the Great Dionysia or, for that matter, would we have psychoanalysis itself. Moreover, if we convert Freud’s acknowledgment of a deep-seated tendency into an axiom we will miss all that is promising in the experience of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its afterlife in Greensboro and beyond. For the GTRC indicates the possibility that communities and citizens can face up to a difficult past amid the disagreements and conflicts in the present, without reifying those disagreements or falling into the traps of amnesia or manic reconciliation. The GTRC helps us to imagine social practices of understanding and working through misrecognition in ways that could enliven democratic practices and fulfill democratic norms.

The promise of the GTRC as a model for the democratic work of mourning is that such processes can create public space where the agonistic struggle for recognition and the civic search for consensual narratives might be combined in ways that mitigate—rather than provoke—paranoid-schizoid defenses. In the absence of their other, these discourses fashion a social world in their own image, in which disagreeable or difficult elements within their assumptions are split off and displaced onto a persecutory other. In isolation from one another, agonism and consensualism fulfill their own prophecies while leaving behind the messy work of democratic coexistence amid historical and enduring traumas of misrecognition. The democratic work of mourning, by contrast, holds together these disparate narratives in ways that can provoke depressive modes of agency by which citizens discover their power in concert with others—seeing those others as complex objects with whom a contentious coexistence is possible.¹²⁸ There are no guarantees of success, and the democratic work of mourning—like the integration of the Kleinian ego—will have to happen repeatedly. Yet the GTRC gives us both reasons for hope and room for action. It is precisely the kind of (good) object and (potential) space from which we might begin, again and again, to democratically mourn in the name of democracy.