Truth, Justice, Reconciliation
The Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Project seeks to educate people about ways of responding to historical harms and their current legacies through truth-telling, promoting acknowledgement and accountability for institutions and other beneficiaries of historical harms, and coming together to develop strategies for repair.
In the wake of South Africa’s influential Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s, people across the US are developing a variety of processes and strategies for surfacing truths of historical harms, inviting public reckonings, setting the record straight, acknowledging past harms, developing reparations commissions, and more. The Restorative Justice Center aims to document and call attention to these efforts, while also partnering with others to engage our own institution, UC Berkeley, in Truth, Justice and Reconciliation processes.
In our first phases of this project, we are working with Tony Platt and the Berkeley Papers Project, which is dedicated to research, assemble and present original, primary documents that illustrate the racial foundations of UC Berkeley. See Tony’s latest publication here. We are also promoting and supporting courses that speak to these topics, including Nazune Menka’s Decolonizing Berkeley and Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Settler Societies, both of which are offered through the Legal Studies Dept. These courses invite students to complete projects about Berkeley’s and California’s historical harms, and to envision what’s needed for truthtelling, transforming the campus, and coming to terms with UC Berkeley’s past. See some of these project here.
Please revisit this site in the next few months to see our further efforts.