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Theophus Smith

Deconstructing the Victim-Perpetrator Paradigm: A Heuristic

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PAPER

Deconstructing the Victim-Perpetrator Paradigm:

A Heuristic[1]

The only resolution of this dilemma is found in experiencing . . . [myself] as victim behind my victimizing . . . recognizing ourselves as victimizing victims in our day-to-day living . . . whence we punish the other . . .

Emphatically to get past the person who is victimizing one to the victim within is the essence of the Christ life, into which Gandhi [too] had much insight.

                                       Sebastian Moore, “’Why Did God Kill Jesus?’”[2]

Outline

1.0       Introduction: A Reconciliation Framework                                   1

2.0       Comedy as Insight                                                                            4

3.0       Regression both Social and Spiritual                                              9

4.0       Open Secret: The Forbidding Alternative to Regression             12

5.0       A New Paradigm: Victim-Exchange                                              15

Appendices

Appendix A       Subtheme and Abstract of this Essay                             19

Appendix B       Conference Theme and Background Discussion           21

Appendix C       Notes on Defining Tolerance                                          24

Appendix D       Practicums & Applications                                             24

Appendix E       A Scholar-Practitioner Profile                                        30

1.0     Introduction: A Reconciliation Framework

Despite its gravity, or because of it, I immediately announce my inclusion of a comic approach to our conference theme.  But before developing that approach further let me introduce the theme itself.  Collectively we are exploring the challenge of sustained toleration: How to sustain tolerance in the face of our human vulnerability to violence and abuse?  While ‘tolerance and vulnerability’ is the broad theme I am undertaking a particular challenge to it: How to approach the theme from a reconciliation perspective?  In that regard I offer a perspective that is informed by my longstanding consideration of the following question.

How do we intervene in the polarized relationship between antagonists in ways that dissolve their antagonism and promote comity between them? 

While such an interest is familiar as a conflict resolution goal or objective, I am not interested in any and every form of conflict resolution.  I am more focused on the deep structure of the antagonism between parties represented as victims on the one hand and as perpetrators on the other.  Deconstructing that polar relationship is my heuristic interest, and my point of departure is the assumption of a dialectical and mimetic relationship between the two.

Similar to Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave in his “Lordship and Bondage” I propose a dynamic reciprocity between victim and perpetrator.  In this connection a phenomenology of mind or spirit can disclose how two parties become self-conscious in relation to one another.  Hegel’s example is compelling: the master can not be self-aware as master without the slave, and vice versa. [3]  Here I propose a similar phenomenology of victims and perpetrators: we can not be fully aware of ourselves as victims apart from our relationship with our perpetrators, and we can not be aware of ourselves as perpetrators apart from our relationship with our victims.  Such reciprocity is unexpected from a conventional perspective, but entirely transparent in a phenomenology of consciousness.  To fathom such phenomena I posit, by hypothesis: (1) a fundamental unity of all human beings irrespective of our victim-perpetrator identities, and more particularly (2) a mutuality in which the interdependence of the two identities or roles is inherently a relationship of exchange.  This hypothesis of the fundamental reality of exchange in the relationship between victims and perpetrators will be a key feature at the end of this essay below.

To further introduce this perspective I propose, moreover, a comic or tragicomic perspective.  Imagine here some film or television melodrama about which the audience knows as much as the actors.  Included in the audience’s epistemic privilege is knowledge of how the dramatic action is contrived by a third force, in this case the playwright or screen director.  In such a scenario even violent conflicts could appear as a kind of ‘slapstick’ comedy; however menacing or lethal they are intended to be within the framework of the drama, they remain nonetheless essentially role-plays.  In such ‘play’ some actors are assigned the part of victim and others agree to be perpetrators but there is nonetheless something arbitrary about those designations and something contrived about the vicious actions and abusive behaviors they enact.

Typically in our lived experience of violence and victimization we do not observe that arbitrary, contrived, and radically comic feature.  What is radically comic is the irony that victims and perpetrators participate in order that the ‘show’ can go on and the ‘play’ can be performed.  At a strategic moment, in reality, either party could cease participation, end the show or dissolve the play.  But meanwhile they functionally enable the drama as if it has a life of its own—not their own!  The irony or absurdity of this enabling behavior is comic if the audience or viewer also understands that the actors are enabling an absurdity.  However from a conventional perspective the victim-perpetrator roles appear to be determined by some intrinsic reality: the victim seems essentially a victim and the perpetrator inherently a perpetrator.  But let us consider the phenomena further from a heuristic perspective. 

A heuristic (cf. Greek ‘eureka!’—I found it!) is understood here as a kind of epistemic ‘search engine’ for finding something that can not be fathomed by ordinary means.  What if—this heuristic supposes—what if we imagine a field-theory of conflictual relationships such that at any given location in the field some actors have become victims and others have become perpetrators, but that in a different configuration the roles could well be reversed, dissolved or otherwise configured?  In this regard the heuristic supposes that informed observers can ‘see through’ any given field of conflict in the way that a viewing audience knows the performative contrivances involved in a play.  We must defer for now consideration of the epistemological preconditions for such knowledge.  But here in an introductory way we can identify the epistemic benefits of such a ‘force field’ analysis of violent conflict.

The benefit of this heuristic is that it enables both parties to acknowledge the arbitrary and contrived nature of their identities, and thus genuinely to share a common interest in overcoming that arbitrariness.  It is in the self-interest of both parties, that is—whether typically represented as victims or typically represented as perpetrators—to exercise relative freedom or choice in the role they are performing at any given time, in any given configuration, or with any particular outcome.  Intolerable to human freedom and the existential dignity of choice, therefore, is the arbitrary nature of field dynamics in which each party simply discovers that it is acting-out one of the roles without benefit of reasoning or the will to do so.  That is the Great Intolerable of the human condition in society.  It is yet another expression of the conditions of existence as constituted by un-freedom, necessity and compulsion—by the bondage to force from which our entire development as a species aims to free us.

The goal of this essay is to expose and deconstruct that universal human captivity of both victims and perpetrators to a third phenomenon—“negative reciprocity” in the terms of this conference.  Moreover I seek to do so with a  phenomenological clarity and an affective competence sufficient to alert and outrage both parties about the ‘pawns’ or ‘puppets’ that we become in our mutual enthrallment.  My visionary impulse here is to contribute to future states of society capable of sustaining ‘positive reciprocity.’  Toward that goal I help to foster an epistemic intelligence and an affective and moral competence that renders our mutual enthrallment increasingly transparent and intolerable for a critical mass of social actors in any given context.  The transition to such intelligence and competence is the ‘tipping point’ for which many other visionaries, ancient and contemporary, have also labored.

For background to my phenomenological approach here, and to the degree that it achieves its discursive goal, I am greatly indebted to the mimetic theory of René Girard and to the international scholarly society dedicated to explore and elaborate that theory: the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R).  Nonetheless the elaboration of mimetic theory in the form of a phenomenology of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators is my particular venture for which I welcome critique and further collaboration.

2.0           Comedy as Insight

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims[4]

But now for an epoché of comic insight and ‘comic relief’!  For that purpose I want to shift our attention to two humorous portrayals of victim-perpetrator dynamics: one that illuminates issues of tolerance and another that highlights the issue of vulnerability.  Imagine first a parody of Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan that explores some contemporary issues of tolerance in our western social contexts.  In light of our conference theme we might rename it The Parable of the Two, Too Good Samaritans.  But before I explain that unconventional title let’s recall the biblical story itself in which a victim has been attacked by thieves and left by the side of the road to suffer or die. 

The gospel of Luke (Lk. 10:25 -37) depicts first one religious leader and afterwards a second coming upon the poor soul.  Instead of stopping to render aid each one in turn crosses to the opposite side of the road.  Thus they abandon the victim in order to go about their other commitments.  Finally a third traveler does stop and intervene, caring for the victim’s wounds and even contracting with a nearby innkeeper to provide for the victim’s convalescence.  That is the proverbial ‘Good Samaritan:’ laudable member of an outcast ethnic community in ancient Samaria that was universally despised among Jesus’ contemporaries. 

In its context the purpose of the parable is to answer the question posed by an interlocutor, ‘Who is my neighbor?’  Cleverly Jesus inverts that question so that it becomes not ‘who is my neighbor?’ but ‘to whom am I a neighbor?’  Thus he concludes by asking “which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" (Luke 10.36).  But this form of the question creates an unforeseen, secondary effect; namely a subliminal advocacy on behalf of Samaritans.  In telling this story the way he does—in choosing a Samaritan as its hero—Jesus  becomes an advocate of toleration for the despised community of Samaritans. 

Coincidentally his strategic choice of a marginalized group to exemplify virtue is also significant for us.  It is significant in the context of our own time; a context in which the limits of tolerance are being tested under conditions that induce us to represent some immigrant groups as ‘good minorities’ and others as bad.  Moreover as mimetic theory anticipates we ourselves, under the pressure to identify good versus bad minorities, are also being configured as representatives of good versus bad toleration.  Reflexively, that is, the same context that impels us to interrogate and evaluate minority communities also raises questions about ourselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘intolerant’ in relation to those communities.

With that introduction consider a parody of The Good Samaritan parable.  I heard it broadcast on talk-radio in the United States several years ago, although its circulation if not origination includes Australia and New Zealand as well.[5]  In my recollected version two ‘do-gooders’ are walking on a path and discover the proverbial victim wounded and bleeding.  In response one turns to the other and exclaims passionately, “Look at this terrible thing!  We’ve got to go and find who did this.  They really need help!”  So the two of them abandon the victim on the side of the road and rush off to find the perpetrators and offer them help instead!  Hence my title for this parody is The Parable of the Two, Too Good Samaritans.

Now here I would prefer to leave with you an unalloyed moment of comic relief and amusement over what might be called a ‘post-liberal’ caricature of a liberal absurdity.  Nonetheless, being a scholar like the rest of us I can not resist an analytical response.  I’m especially motivated to pursue a particular line of inquiry whenever an instance of humor conforms to the aforementioned aphorism by Nietzsche: “A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”   At the risk of spoiling the joke (in the effort to make explicit its serious import) allow me to venture a query in line with Nietzsche’s insight.  I wonder whether we who are able to laugh at the parody of The Two, Too Good Samaritans are, by implication, existentially located on the other side of “the death of a feeling.” 

To be explicit, I wonder whether what has ‘died’ among us is a bourgeois feeling of satisfaction or rightness—not to say moral righteousness—about certain principles and practices that might be experienced by others as condescending or patronizing.  What if certain forms of tolerance effectively abandon the real world of lived experience in preference for a projected world of misguided idealism?  In the same way that the Two, Too Good Samaritans prefer to help idealized perpetrators and in effect abandon concrete victims, are our ideologies of tolerance similarly misguided?  Is our laughter at this joke evidence that in our post-liberal condition we are increasingly aware of and self-critical of ideological extremes that are pragmatically ineffectual, even pernicious in the real world?

A ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ (Ricoeur) regarding the pernicious aspects of our liberal excesses leads me to another comic illustration.  This one highlights the issue of our vulnerability in the context of a post-liberal condition.  (So, after analytically spoiling one joke I will proceed to do something similar with a second one!)  Actually this is not a joke but a cartoon that I call, playfully, The ‘Why Do They Eat Us?’ Consternation.  In this cartoon we see two bears standing upright and facing each other in private conversation, while behind them a hapless hiker has been caught and hangs suspended from a tree limb.  You see him stuck there with his hiking gear hanging from him.  Then one bear says to the other, referring to the hiker: “His name's Bradshaw. He says he understands I came from a single-parent den with inadequate role models. He senses that my dysfunctional behavior is shame-based and codependent and he urges me to let my inner cub heal . . . . . . . . . . . . I say we eat him.”[6]

 His name's Bradshaw.    He says he understands I

came from a single-parent den with inadequate role models.   He senses that my dysfunctional behavior is

shame-based and codependent and he urges me to let my inner cub heal . . . . . . . . . . . . I say we eat him.

So here I must ask, inevitably of course, ‘What makes this second illustration also funny?’  In this case I want to point to another feature of comedy besides Nietzsche’s “epigram on the death of a feeling.”  More familiar is the truism that humor is a way of revealing the truth that bypasses or circumvents our defense against the truth; that is, our defense against knowing uncomfortable truths about ourselves.  Now it is a fallacy of logic that any or every ‘appeal to humor’ contains an exaggerated but ‘bravely-spoken’ truth.  Truth-revealing humor is only one form of comedy among others.  Nonetheless, as one commentator observes, telling the truth through humor is a staple of good comedy. 

Any stand-up comic will tell you that the secret to humor is: tell the truth.  A good comic tells us things about ourselves that we normally wouldn't want to hear since they are too embarrassing or sensitive.  But by getting us to laugh at the truth about ourselves, we learn to recognize our own foibles . . .   Laughter is a natural and healthy way to respond when we recognize that someone has offered us a bravely-spoken, but possibly uncomfortable, truth.[7]

Exaggeration of an uncomfortable truth is the form of comedy offered by this second illustration of our post-liberal condition.  In this regard the first illustration of the Two, Too Good Samaritans likewise depends for its comic effect on exaggeration: exaggerating a type of naïve idealism that is excessive and all-too-familiar in our culture.  But the second illustration of the two bears scenario exposes something more.  What are further exposed are the pernicious consequences of liberal naiveté.  Perhaps as we laugh or chuckle following that punch line, “I say we eat him,” comes recognition that naïve liberalism puts us at risk for being victimized by the very type of intolerance that we eschew and seek to overcome.  Hence my title of the two bears scenario—The ‘Why Do They Eat Us’ Consternation—is based on a double parody: (1) a parody of ourselves as morally righteous and forbearing (pun intended) on the one hand, if also condescending with our attitudes of psychological superiority on the other, and (2) a parody of our neighbors as disarmingly astute about our orientation and ideals  on the one hand, if also indifferent to them and aggressively prepared to exploit them on the other hand. 

First, our own liberalism is parodied by exaggerating the condescending or patronizing way in which we too often stereotype or even excuse the behavior of our neighbors as ‘those people’ who

• come from single-parent homes, or
• have inadequate role models, or
• act-out dysfunctional behavior that is shame-based and codependent, or
• need to let their inner [child] heal.

Of course, the fact that we can parody our stereotypes and our ideological excesses gives evidence that we are to some degree in a post-liberal condition in relation to them.  On the other hand, this particular cartoon caricatures the antagonists with attitudes also parodied; parodied here in a manner that exaggerates their behavior as ‘pre-liberal’, indifferent and even abusive of our traditions of tolerance and our liberal ideals.  The result of this ‘clash’ of perspectives, pre-liberal and post-liberal, is punctuated by the punch-line of the two bears scenario.  The vulnerability we incur as a result of our deteriorated liberal ethos becomes evident when the erstwhile beneficiaries of that liberalism respond with the equivalent of: ‘I say we eat them.’

The humor here turns on the irony that excessive tolerance among some parties has incurred the extreme intolerance of other parties—the very opposite of what was intended and expected.  Moreover, in line with Nietzsche’s aphoristic claim that our laughter gives evidence for the demise of certain feelings, the humor also reveals a society in regression from its liberal ideals and ideologies.  That regression has the character of an illiberal and increasingly reactionary, intolerant backlash against neighbors who are experienced as exploiting and abusing the ideals and values of toleration that they encounter in western societies.  A consideration of how that regression has occurred, and subsequent consideration of strategies that could preclude or repair such an outcome, follow in the sections below.

3.0           Regression both Social and Spiritual

The most fearsome economic crisis is there—and the revolution however does not come.  There must be still another cause which brings about a revolution, and when it is not operative, the revolution fails to appear or misfires.  This cause is the Geist of the masses.[8]

[W]e can raise the question of whether alongside the socio-historical Thermidor that can be demonstrated in all past revolutions there is not also perhaps a psychic Thermidor?  Are revolutions perhaps not only defeated, reversed and undone from outside; is there not perhaps in the individuals themselves already a dynamic at work which internally negates a possible liberation and gratification, and allows them to submit not only externally to the forces of denial?[9]

In the second passage quoted above the Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, articulated in social-political terms a perspective that has become quite familiar by now in psychosocial terms.  It is the phenomenon of self-sabotage in which people unwittingly undermine their own self-interest and negate their own best efforts by regressive behaviors—behaviors that reassert the very phenomena they seek to overcome.[10]  To represent such phenomena in graphic terms Marcuse borrowed a term familiar to him as a historian and critical theorist of Germany ’s revolutionary experience: the metaphor of “Thermidor.” 

The term was first coined during the French Revolution to refer simply to one of the warm (thermal) months of summer (specifically the second month of the summer quarter).  It so happened that it was during the month of Thermidor in 1794 that the counter-revolution occurred in France , resulting in the execution by guillotine of the key revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre.  Robespierre’s demise marked the end of the notorious Reign of Terror that began in 1793 and resulted in the execution of thousands of victims.  Subsequently some historians of revolution have associated the term “Thermidor” with any counter-revolution in which a society reverts to some degree back to its pre-revolutionary conditions.[11]

More recently critical theorists have attributed this social-political form of regression to a psychosocial phenomenon called ‘internalized oppression.’  Internalized oppression is the turning-inward of domination by a victim group so that the structures of domination become self-imposed and self-enforcing by members of the group itself.  Stereotypical forms of this near-universal phenomenon include: the colonizer within the colonized, women who self-sabotage their professional careers, the ‘self-hating Jew,’ so-called black-on-black crime, children who bully other children in emulation of adults, and so on.  It is key however to observe that this internalization is fundamentally involuntary and unconscious.

A dialectical perspective . . . recognizes that the effects of systematic mistreatment sediment themselves in the consciousness (and sub-consciousness) of the oppressed . . .   As a result, oppression is recycled; mistreatment is passed along by the victims themselves.  Having internalized the norms and values of the dominant group . . . [they] often mistreat each other in an unconscious imitation of their own suffering.[12]

Finally, there is a homology between this psychosocial form of regression and a psycho-spiritual form of regression that is familiar in the Christian mystical tradition of the ‘dark night of the soul.’  In ‘dark night’ mysticism God is experienced as bringing a devotee’s soul ever closer to divine union.  However many such souls, the tradition warns, flee this fulfillment for fear of what is on the other side of their familiar ways of being human.  They naturally prefer their conventional and familiar alienation from God to a union with the divine that seems so forbidding in its unfamiliarity.  Ironically this union can seem strangely inhuman but is represented in mystical tradition as the fulfillment of the human. 

This fulfillment of our humanity includes in its range of proficiencies a type of victimization that I call ‘lucid victimization.’  Epitomized in Christianity preeminently by Jesus himself, lucid victimization was also embodied in the life of  ‘the mystical doctor’ of dark night phenomena: the Spanish theologian St. John of the Cross (1542-1591).[13]  I will return to this topic more extensively below.  Here I introduce the topic and terminology as a more proficient form of victimization that is being rediscovered in our time.  For now, it suffices to note that in less proficient forms of victimization one seeks release from one’s experience of violation by ‘doing unto others what was done unto us.’  In lucid victimization, rather, one experiences one’s perpetrators as those who are ‘doing unto others what was done unto them.’ 

Too often however the dark night phenomenon is so distressing and forbidding that subjects abort the process by reverting to earlier forms of perception.  Often an astute spiritual director is required in order to intervene and prevent such regression, and to encourage the subject to persist in the disciplined practices and originating commitments that will lead to a desired breakthrough.  Thus a signal feature of this phenomenon is the practice of renunciatory disciplines that facilitate passage through the dark night.  In its classical mystical tradition these practices include the renunciation of immature and impure modes of spirituality; modes that actually ensnare the soul in habits of envy and rivalry, and that lay the basis for arrogance and resentment.  Indeed in the dark night subjects may—and most indeed typically do—abort their participation in progressive dynamics and revert to earlier, less developed stages of the process.  To forestall such regression, and to complete the trajectory of the psychosocial dark night toward its benign dawn, requires the kind of practices that I explore in more detail below.

4.0           Open Secret: The Forbidding Alternative to Regression

By taking sides, we inevitably ignore the true center of gravity of the process—the scapegoat mechanism, still religiously transfigured . . . 

The whole religious dimension of these events remains hidden by too exclusive an emphasis on the political aspects, real as they are.

René Girard, Job: The Victim of His People[14]

How do we deconstruct the real enemy of us all: the victim-perpetrator paradigm?  Choosing the side of either victim or perpetrator displays ignorance of the paradigm itself, specifically its deep structure according to which, by hypothesis here, perpetrators are former victims.  On this view ‘the enemy’ is not our perpetrator.  The real enemy, rather, is the ‘victim-hold’ that the experience of victimization still exercises upon our perpetrators.  Instead of one set of victims therefore we have two categories of victim to ‘take the side of,’ or advocate for, in any given conflict: the presenting victim on the one hand, and the former victim now-turned-perpetrator in that specific conflict.

‘Doing unto others what was done unto us’ is the defining feature of the victim-perpetrator paradigm.   The paradigm consists in the cyclical process by which we-as-perpetrators compulsively act out our own unresolved victimization onto our stereotypes as classes of available victims.  Targeting such victims constitutes our desperate but misguided and even magical attempt to render our victimization as though it had never occurred in the past.  Our species attempts this chronically by re-creating ourselves in the present as the empowered victimizer rather than the disempowered victim in our past.

To understand this pernicious paradigm is to gain immediately the possibility for intuiting its remedy.  Existentially however (under the conditions of existence, that is) the obvious remedy is so forbidding that simply to ‘think it’ becomes cognitively inaccessible.  In this state of affairs all the insights and resources for deconstructing the victim-perpetrator paradigm are available to us in the contemporary period, and yet we persist in regressive forms of law and justice that maintain that paradigm.  On this view deconstructing the victim-perpetrator paradigm consists in providing former victims with alternatives to the mimetic strategy by means of which we-as-perpetrators seek to counteract our victimization.

In place of role reversal it is preferable that victims have recourse to a more effective means to recover from the disempowerment and trauma of victimization.  To be truly effective such an alternative would need to empower us with as much affective force as—but without the counter-victimizing force of—role reversal.  The challenge is this: how to achieve the power without the ‘vice’ of imitative role reversal; how to re-empower victims, that is, without their incurring the viciousness of ‘doing unto others what was done unto us.’

For obvious psychological reasons most of us as former victims are constitutionally incapable of realizing such alternatives unaided. In the preceding section I described victims who are so capable as practitioners of ‘lucid victimization.’  But this facility requires developmental maturity, group traditions of practice and, perhaps, great good fortune.  Most victims need instead some kind of external intervention from an observant mediator, or from a community of mediation.  Such a mediating agency can intervene simply by providing the kind of mimetically-effective compensation that we-as-perpetrators seek to achieve when we counter-victimize others.  To repeat: usually the mimetically-effective compensation is the victim’s re-empowerment through imitation; imitating the conditions of one’s victimization with the roles reversed.  How can one achieve that compensation without the vicious feature of role reversal?

Rather than abandoning former victims to take matters into their own hands in the form of role reversals, we as mediators and as mediating communities—possessing as we do greater resources and psychological distance from the conflict—would take the matter upon ourselves.[15]  The remedy resides therefore in the facility of an observant mediator or mediating community to approximate and administer effective compensation instead.  Enacting this facility with more efficacy occurs when victims themselves are consulted in order to determine the following conditions for effectiveness: (1) the nature of the injury on the one hand, and (2) effective compensation for recovering from that injury. 

Most often, of course, perpetrators are not available or prepared to compensate their victims accordingly.  Therefore a mediating community would approximate this compensation instead.  Precisely here, however, we discover that this substitutionary alternative is unthinkable for conventional morality, law and jurisprudence.  Conventional standards of right and wrong, and long-standing traditions of crime and punishment, require that perpetrators themselves compensate their victims, not third parties.  But this inability to imagine third-party compensation is due only to the fact that conventional morality and law are not ‘phenomenologically aware’ of the victim-perpetrator paradigm. 

Ordinary consciousness fixates on the atomized event of victimization, with its bipolar structure of the victim and the perpetrator, and so fails to see the larger field of relations and deep structure within which we-as-perpetrators are ourselves former victims.  In this connection I remind the reader of a field theory approach to victim/perpetrator reciprocity, as discussed in the introductory section above.  To become phenomenologically aware[16] of this larger field of relations and structures is to acknowledge the victim-perpetrator paradigm itself.  More specifically, phenomenological awareness discerns the diachronic sequence in which victims become perpetrators who create new victims in an endless cycle.  To intervene in and mitigate that cycle is in the interest of every party and of every observer within the field of relations.

For it is not simply altruism that impels us to intervene, nor is the object of our intervention simply a matter of the bipolar relationships between victims and their perpetrators.  Rather, we the observant community are indirect and prospective targets in the ongoing cycle of the victim-perpetrator paradigm, and therefore we are intervening in the multi-relational matter of restoring human comity for ourselves as members of an at-risk community.  The self-interested (vs. naively liberal or altruistic only) incentive toward this restorative imperative is being developed in the contemporary period through the movement called “restorative justice.”

Restorative justice contrasts significantly with retaliatory or retributive justice, as well as with conventional forms of distributive justice.  For it seeks to rectify not only the violations perpetrated by offenders against their victims, but also the larger civic relationships that are impaired by such violations.[17]  Thus it is distinguished from conventional applications of ‘distributive justice’—the judicial distribution of compensations due to victims and punishments due to offenders.  Restorative justice seeks instead to restore social comity and civic honor to an entire community rather than litigate for aggrieved parties only.  In that connection restorative practices reinstate or repristinate the human rights of both victim and offender in the context of a skilled and inclusive community. 

Moreover such a community is mature enough to take account of its own dysfunctions as a contributing factor in the misdeeds of its citizens. This perspective shifts the focus from perpetrators only, to the institutional sponsors and the enabling networks of perpetration (government agencies, schools, congregations, civic groups, etc.).  In that larger context restorative justice contrasts with the more narrow focus of retributive justice and conventional forms of criminal justice.  It aims instead to ‘restore’ to those enabling agents and agencies, as well as to their victims, human rights values and orientations. 

5.0           A New Paradigm: Victim-Exchange

Now we victimized Jesus . . . We killed him as the representative of a way of being human that we fear to come into.  We sacrificed him to the god of our devising . . . who legitimates life as we understand it . . .  But the real God did not accept this sacrifice . . . turned it around on us by raising the victim from the dead . . .   [And] in the risen presence of the victim . . . my definition of sacrifice is fulfilled, though with all the values changed . . .

Sebastian Moore, “The New Convivium”[18]

Deconstructing the victim-perpetrator paradigm consists, first, in enabling perpetrator communities to retrieve to consciousness the founding events of injury and victimization in their specific social histories (cf. Greek: anamnesis, lit. un-forgetting; cf. psychology: abreacting).   Second, such groups need collectively to purge or cathartically release (vent) the hold that the group’s victim-identity possesses over its members.  As postulated above, members of such communities experience an involuntary captivity to their victim-identity.[19]  That ‘victim-hold’ is typically forgotten or occluded but nonetheless operates in ways that are variably reactive, compensatory, or in some way motivating of ongoing attitudes and behaviors.  Breaking the victim-hold requires a non-victimizing intervention by means of a catharsis sufficient to release an entire group from the shame-rage dynamics generated by every experience of victimization.

Katharsis: thus the Greeks called the state of mind produced by the spectacle of the tragedy . . . the purification of the soul which springs from having grasped a deeper meaning in things . . . which breaks the hybris [arrogant presumption, pride] as it was seen to be broken in the tragedy; which liberates from the violent passions of life and leads the soul to peace.[20]

Third, effective catharsis must be physiological at depth and not only cognitive or verbal (since shame-rage affects inhere in the body as well as the psyche).  Fourth, such catharsis must not re-target the perpetrator-community, as if its humanity or ‘being’ were the problem rather than the shared experience of victimization.

The entire process of intervention may be represented sequentially as follows:

(1)  Enable members of the perpetrator community to retrieve to consciousness the occluded events of collective injury and victimization in the group’s social history;

(2)  Do this not as mere invitation to complaint or rage (thus bypassing grief) but in the form of a catharsis designed to purge the toxic emotions of shame and grief that holds the group’s identity hostage to its history of victimization;

(3)  Thus induce events or processes that elicit a physiological release of such emotions in ways that include, but also go beyond, the level of mental or verbal forms of venting and release;

(4)  Ensure that such processes do not conspire to ‘retro-victimize’ or re-target the perpetrator community in ways that reactivate its former victim status and history, thus reinforcing its reactive perpetrator behaviors and identity in the present.

It is challenging in practice of course to establish the empirical conditions for such interventions at the macro-social level, as a means of testing the proposed hypothesis.  But in the near past such verification sites have included the mid-20th century civil rights movement in the U.S. South, the comparably nonviolent case of the fall of apartheid in South Africa , and dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of the century.  More recently the still developing structure of truth commissions has been applied to the legacy of racial violence in the U.S. [21]

In this connection we have the benefit of new research and future projections by University of Maryland law professor Sherrilyn Ifill.  Writing in 2003 Ifill argued persuasively for a “lynching TRC” (truth and reconciliation commission)

[that] would be deliberately directed away from lynching perpetrators, and focused instead on individuals and local institutions that promoted, condoned or tolerated lynching.  The lynching TRC would provide a means for ordinary people who actively or passively condoned lynching and those whose communities were terrorized by lynching to explore opportunities for healing and reparation.  . . . Certainly “truth-telling” about the complicity of state and local officials in lynching alone would be an important step toward repairing communities torn apart by lynching. [22]

Ifill concludes that “both whites and blacks must actively participate in efforts aimed at repairing the damage caused by lynching.  Creating local fora where community members can engage in cross- and intra-racial dialogue is a first step toward helping face the historical reality of lynching and finding ways to promote reconciliation and restoration to communities devastated by lynching.”[23]

Ifill’s views coincide with crucial emphases in the ‘restorative justice’ movement.  Offenders themselves for instance intrinsically understand that their crimes or misdeeds were passively and even actively supported and abetted by institutions and systems in the larger society.  They rightly intuit that they are being targeted with a surplus of blame when the community singles them out exclusively for acts that in fact characterize antisocial practices prevailing elsewhere in society.  A more thoroughgoing and effective measure would require reparations not only to victims but also, ironically, to those offenders about whom it could be reasonably demonstrated that they were systemically socialized to hate and fear.  In any case the key concept of fairness signals a shift in focus from simply perpetrators to the community sponsors and the enabling networks for this kind of violence; that is, the rest of us.

This expansion of focus augurs a paradigm shift that is both post-liberal (intolerant of certain excesses) and post-conservative (not simply punitive but also restorative).  However, in order that this reconfiguring of ourselves alongside putative perpetrators be pragmatically effective in the concrete situation of real victims, experience has shown that it must be more than cognitive.  Heretofore communities of recovery have provided inadequate resources for this reconfiguring work.  The provisions for recovery have been primarily (1) cognitive or explanatory—providing this or that theory of human conflict, or (2) moral or exhortatory—providing this or that encouragement to be virtuous or ‘better than’.  More dynamic efforts have been (3) affective or otherwise therapeutic—providing for example psychodynamic healing work.  The resources proposed here, rather, are (4) interpersonally restorative: they provide both victims and perpetrators with coordinated process for restoring their co-humanity.  And because the preconditions for such restoration typically exceed the resources that individuals can provide alone, it requires a mature community within which victims and their perpetrators are no longer isolated from each other and polarized in conformity to the victim-perpetrator paradigm.

A restorative process is proposed here not only at the macro-social level of intra-state relations, the level at which it was most dramatically conducted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa from 1995 to 1998.  Rather the truth commission process is also significant for the micro-social level of intergroup conflict, for example (a)  through hearings that bring together both parties engaged in historical or local civic disputes and (b) through institutional compensations such as continuing education and vocational training for both victim and perpetrator communities.  More generally, therefore, a restorative justice framework can provide a ‘proving ground’ for discovering how to deconstruct the victim-perpetrator paradigm exponentially, with cascading benefits occurring everywhere throughout a social system. 

Until now the majority of us have been able to target with impunity the most blatant purveyors of violence and victimization.  In this way we have successfully evaded recognition and rehabilitation of our own perpetrator and complicit behaviors.  Our myopia and impunity are ending now, in this 21^st century and this new millennium.  They are ending because the contemporary period is providing new insights into the cultural preconditions for crimes against humanity.  Those insights are effectively exposing this subterfuge: the hidden stratagem by which we project onto a minority of us sole responsibility for human rights violations that actually implicate the rest of us. 

The preconditions for massive human rights violations are, by hypothesis, systemic rather than attributable to the aberrant behavior of a few criminal personalities.  If so, then we who perpetrate more subtle and systemic crimes, or who secretly enable the perpetrators, have been unawarely scapegoating the perpetrators of more heinous violations.  This perspective does not provide a rationale for exonerating them, of course.  Rather it mandates rehabilitating them alongside ourselves, and no longer in isolation from ourselves.

In this emerging paradigm new principles and practices of tolerance can arise out of acknowledging ourselves in vulnerability with our neighbors as victim-perpetrators.  With increasing transparency we may see-through the fields of conflict how our newly acknowledged vulnerability can authorize compensatory policies and practices that convert enemies to allies.  Indeed our own admitted complicity in violence and abuse can generate a reciprocity with our neighbors; no longer condescending and superior attitudes but genuine interdependence based on the authenticity of our human interrelatedness.[24]  Thus a comic (hilarious) versus tragic (hellacious) prospect can become available to us in solidarity with those with whom we acknowledge a shared liability for the violence that impacts us all—a true reciprocity.                                                           /end

Appendix A

Subtheme and Abstract of this Essay

www.bezinningscentrum.nl/teksten/girard/c/c2007_Smith_Theophus_abstract.htm

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Theophus Smith: Deconstructing the Victim-Perpetrator Paradigm: A Heuristic

Subtheme # 5: Reconciliation as the Conversion of Negative into Positive Reciprocity

Towards peaceful relation

Reciprocity is mimetic: each party mirrors the other's actions, whether hurtful or helpful. Just as hostility feeds on negative reciprocity, positive reciprocity fosters peaceful relations. The challenge is to shift from one to the other. Once a spiral of revenge is underway, it is hard to reverse course without making oneself vulnerable. 

Conflict resolution: overcoming obstacles 

A peace overture risks being seen as a sign of weakness by the enemy, while peace advocates lay themselves open to accusations of treason from their own side. How can these obstacles be overcome? Do practical methods exist to facilitate the leap from violent to peaceful reciprocity? [SEE APPENDIX D: PRACTICUMS & APPLICATIONS below.]  What can the mimetic theory contribute to lessons about conflict resolution drawn from anthropology, history, political science, psychotherapy or other disciplines?

Moderator: Simon Simonse (Pax Christi Netherlands)

Background/Discussion: "Breakthrough in Peace Talks in Northern Uganda", August 26, 2006 . - Roel Kaptein, On the way of freedom. With the cooperation of Duncan Morrow. Introduction by René Girard (The Columba Press, 1993, Nederlandse vertaling).- [ ] 

ABSTRACT

By taking sides, we inevitably ignore the true center of gravity of the process

—the scapegoat mechanism, still religiously transfigured . . .

René Girard, Job: The Victim of His People  (Stanford, 1987; p. 59)

How can we deconstruct the real enemy of us all: the victim-perpetrator paradigm?  'Taking the side' of one or the other displays ignorance of the victim-perpetrator paradigm itself, specifically its deep structure according to which (by definition here) perpetrators are former victims-turned-perpetrators.  On this view ‘the enemy’ is not our perpetrator.  The final enemy, rather, is the ‘victim-hold’ that the experience of victimization still exercises upon our perpetrators. 

Instead of one set of victims, therefore, we have two categories of victim to ‘side with’ or advocate for in any given conflict: the presenting victim on the one hand, and the former victim now-turned-perpetrator in that specific conflict.  Thus we replicate the cyclical process by which we-as-perpetrators compulsively act out our own unresolved victimization onto our stereotypical classes of available victims: the mimeticism of 'the repetition syndrome.'  

'Doing unto others what was done unto us’ is the defining feature of that paradigm.  Targeting our victims constitutes our desperate but misguided, mimetic-magical attempt to render our victimization as though it had never occurred.  Our species attempts this chronically by re-creating ourselves in the present as the empowered victimizer rather than the disempowered victim in our past.

This essay explores an alternative recourse(s) for victims-turned-perpetrators.  Remarkably all the insights and resources for deconstructing the victim-perpetrator paradigm are available to us in the contemporary period. Yet we persist in regressive forms of ethics, law, justice, and policy that maintain that paradigm.  

Deconstructing the victim-perpetrator paradigm consists in providing former victims with alternatives to the mimetic strategy by means of which we-as-perpetrators seek to counteract our victimization: by imitating the content of our victimization via role reversal. To be truly effective such an alternative would need to empower us with as much affective force as—but without the counter-victimizing goal of—role reversal.  The challenge is how to achieve the power without the ‘vice’ of imitative role reversal?  

Most former victims are psycho-dynamically incapable of realizing such alternatives unaided.  Subsequent sections describe victims who are so capable as practitioners of ‘lucid victimization.’  But this facility requires developmental maturity, traditions of practice, and perhaps great good fortune.  Most of us need rather some kind of external intervention by an observant mediator or community of mediation.  Such a mediating agency can intervene by providing the kind of mimetically-effective compensation that we-as-perpetrators seek to achieve when we counter-victimize others.  

Subheadings included [preliminary]:

Truth Commissions as Heuristic^[25][1]

“No-Fault Reconciliation” (C. Eric Lincoln, Coming through the Fire, 1996)

Bipartisan Reparations, and Joint Venture Restitutions.

Appendix B:   Conference Theme and Background Discussion

www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/  

www.bezinningscentrum.nl/links/special_links3/covr2007.shtml

Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit July, 4-8  2007

[français] Two political murders have sent a shock wave through the Netherlands , a country that prides itself on its historical tolerance. On May 6, 2002 the politician Pim Fortuyn was killed by an animal rights activist. Two and a half years later, on November 4, 2004 Theo van Gogh, a publicist and filmmaker, was killed by a Muslim fundamentalist. Both murders manifest the heightened tension between immigrant minorities and the native population in the Netherlands . Fortuyn had broken the conventional code of political tolerance by giving voice to populist discontent about immigrants. Van Gogh had relentlessly tested the margins of freedom of expression, especially regarding sensitive minorities like Jews and Muslims. Both of them in their own way had exposed the indifference underlying Dutch discourse on tolerance. 

Heated public debate

The killings of these two men have prompted a heated public debate on tolerance and the freedom of speech that continues today. Witnessing the vicious spiral of intolerance in the wake of Van Gogh’s murder and the defensive measures taken by the authorities to stem the tide of polarisation, the Amsterdam city chronicler Geert Mak wrote a compelling pamphlet in defense of tolerance advocating a culture of vulnerability giving a positive political thrust to the notion of vulnerability.

Rethinking concepts

The commission preparing the Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R) 2007 in Amsterdam proposes to link up with Mak's challenge to rethink the concepts of tolerance in different social and political contexts. The developments in the Netherlands do not stand alone. They epitomise fundamental questions concerning vulnerability and tolerance in today’s world. We invite the participants to explore the significance of the connection of tolerance and vulnerability in their respective disciplines and in their various professional or personal experiences using the models of mimetic theory in their analyses. >> Preview

Opening session at the Vrije Universiteit July 4, 2007 , 13.00-17.00

Growing intolerance 

The Dutch case as an example of global tendencies

In Holland the new intolerance comes in the wake of a crisis of identities. In less than a quarter-century the Dutch did away with their system of ‘social pillars’ (zuilen), the faith and ideology based identities that formed the building-blocks of a tolerant, relatively diverse, non-confrontational society. 

World capital of relativism?

This society came to an end in the wake of the renewal movement of the late 60s. In their levelling effects the 60s were more radical in Holland than in other European countries and across the Atlantic . The consensus-oriented political culture combined with avoidance of confrontation in the enforcement of the law resulted in policies that, deliberately and within limits, turned a blind eye to specific categories of trespassers of the law (gedoogcultuur). Its official tolerance combined with the demise of its social pillars earned Holland , Amsterdam in particular, the reputation of a place where anything goes, ‘the world capital of relativism’ as Nathan Gardels, in an interview with René Girard, recently put it. 

Ambivalence

The response of the various waves of immigrants that entered the Netherlands since the 60s is ambivalent and mixed. They arrived when the general drive to do away with the old differentiated order had produced irreversible changes and were encouraged to join in what was presented as a “free for all” but excluded many. Many immigrants became models of affirmative integration like Somali born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while others were sucked into hateful polarisation like Van Gogh’s killer, Mohammed B., a son of Moroccan immigrants. 

Global perspective

There is a sense of despair in the search for an appropriate response. On the one hand there are the demands for a wider mandate for law-enforcement agencies and for a restriction of democratic freedoms. On the other hand a stance of refusal to give in to the violent intolerance of a minority and a readiness to accept the resulting vulnerability. Participants in the workshop The Dutch case will place the above mentioned tendencies and the responses of government and civil society in a global comparative perspective and hopefully provide the beginning of an answer to the vexed question: What does a society that is tolerant of minorities do when it is confronted with a minority that is violently intolerant?

Appendix C

Notes on Defining Tolerance

Prof. David Little with annotation by Prof. Thee Smith

Consider here two levels of tolerance.  The first level is very familiar as a form of social restraint: (a) we disapprove of offensive ideas or behaviors but we let them exist without exercising force or coercion to change, punish or correct them.  That is the basic form of tolerance that is very familiar to most of us in civil society. 

For example: we tolerate drivers who break the speed limit or make illegal turns without reporting them to the police (neither reporting ourselves, of course!) even when we strongly disapprove of their actions.  The natural impulse is to challenge, correct or punish people whose actions we find highly offensive, invasive, or objectionable.  Not to act on that impulse is, by definition, to be tolerant.  Moreover whether one decides to do so deliberately or is simply negligent, one is still regarded as tolerant.

But there is a second form of toleration that is more meritorious or virtuous.  It is the tolerance we exercise when (b) we actively choose to respect the other person as a person, even though we strongly disagree with their ideas or disapprove of their actions.  In either case we refrain from using force or coercion to resist, correct or punish them.  Indeed, we may go further than simply repressing or sublimating our disapproval in order to respect them as a person: we may actively advocate for their right to think or act as they do despite our vigorous disagreement or disapproval. 

These distinctions are taken from the March 26, 2001 lecture by David Little, Dermot Professor of the Practice of Religion, Ethnicity and International Conflict at Harvard Divinity School, entitled, “Rethinking Religious Tolerance” and presented as part of the Emory University Religion Department’s week-long symposium titled “Holy Wars: Conflict and Tolerance in the Religious Imagination” and archived online at www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/RELIGION/holywars.html  Prof. Little’s two definitions are reported in the article, “Religious Tolerance Starts with a Definition” with a description of the presentation accessible online at

www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/2001/April/erApril.2/4_2_01tolerance.html

[The first definition] is “a response to a set of beliefs that are originally thought to be objectionable, with disapproval but without using force or coercion [to change them].” . . . In the second definition, tolerance not only does not use coercion or force against an opponent, but a tolerant person respects the other’s viewpoint. Little used the term “sublimated disapproval.” Eric Rangus for Emory Report.

Appendix D

Practicums & Applications

Sacred Lies / Sacred Violence Clinic©

Introduction: This workshop offers a kind of 'clinic' for diagnosing our personal and societal attraction to violence as ‘sacred.’  As a practicum it is also clinical by first diagnosing and then prescribing treatment for a species-wide distemper: our perennial impulse to rely on violence as the ‘savior’ of final recourse, saving us in our worst conflicts with each other.  

To dispel this pandemic reliance participants explore the 5 questions below in solidarity across our differences.  (Adapted from Cherie R. Brown & George J. Mazza, Healing Into Action: Leadership Guide for Creating Diverse Communities; Washington, DC: National Coalition Building Institute, 1998; p.49)

5 Step Practicum

1.        When was a time that you participated or acquiesced in ‘holy rage:’ i.e., experienced exhilaration or ecstatic release (catharsis) in targeting someone or some group with accusation, prejudice, conflict, anger, violence or war?

Example: We acquiesced . . . when our Christian or Jewish friends insisted . . .  that Muslims and Islamic societies are inherently oppressive or violent.

2.              When was a time that you successfully renounced such feelings, or intervened or interrupted the acting-out of such feelings by others, on behalf of someone or some group being targeted? 

Example: We stood-up for . . . when our Muslim friends discounted the integrity of their faith based on their liberal morality or tolerance for homosexuality . . .

3.              When was an early time in life or an early time in history that you or your group were the target of sacred lies or violence, and no one intervened on your behalf?

Example: As African heritage peoples we were targeted by poisonous theologies that misrepresented God as . . . ‘cursing’ us to serve other peoples . . .

4.              What is similar in the way you ‘targeted-out’ at others or did not intervene on their behalf, and the way in which you or your group was targeted-at or abandoned without intervention?  (What’s similar in your answers to questions 1 and 3)? 

Insight: Consider how ‘targeting-out’ at others relates to being targeted first ourselves, and/or to ‘targeting-in’ at ourselves. Experience . . . [how] this . . . ‘breaks the magic spell’ and releases us . . .

________________

plus a 5^th Step . . .

5.        How would you re-play (or role play) the incident in no. 1 differently if you were completely free from the negative effects of no. 3?

__________

Conclusion: In Steps 4 & 5 participants typically experience insights that ‘break the magic spell’ and release from misguided cycles of ‘doing unto others what was done unto us.’ 

* Sacred Lies / Sacred Violence Clinic©

2007 by Thurman Reconciliation Initiatives©   — TRI Inc.

P.O. Box 5925 Atlanta , GA 31107 USA

c/o Prof. Theophus “Thee” Smith, thee.smith@emory.edu | 404-727-0636

from 2003-2006 also a founding director of

Southern Truth and Reconciliation

Y     STAR     Y

www.southerntruth.org

The Road to Justice for Human Rights Abuses

     © Jose Rodriguez, "The Old Road "

Is civic harmony in your community being undermined by a history of racial conflict? Have local citizens and community leaders been searching for ways to overcome a legacy of racial violence? If so, perhaps your network of civic groups is ready to consider the possibility of truth commissions as a way to address these issues. And maybe STAR can help.

WHAT IS STAR?

Download text as PDF file at www.southerntruth.org/resources.htm

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, left his visiting professorship at Emory University , he challenged the United States to address its history of racial violence with an effort equivalent to that of the South African process. Following the culmination of the "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" exhibit at the Martin Luther King National Historic site, a joint venture with Emory University, momentum built around Tutu's charge.

The grim and violent images of lynched bodies surrounded by white onlookers were a reminder of the spectacle nature of lynching in the late 19th and early 20th century, and a testament to the complicity of entire communities that was necessary for such lynchings to occur. The exhibition of these images in Atlanta was controversial, no doubt because they were a stark reminder of a shameful part of our collective American history.

The exhibit itself provided insight into the particular challenges that Southern Truth and Reconciliation (STAR) would face in addressing histories of racial and ethnic violence in American communities. Unlike in South Africa , or other nations around the world, the truth and reconciliation processes in the United States are unlikely to occur within the lifetimes of those who experienced, witnessed, participated, or were directly affected by the violence.

When we consider that many of the lynching photographs and postcards from the exhibit were found hidden in desk drawers and attics, we come to terms with one of the most critical steps in the reconciliation process: uncovering and sharing openly a painful past that has been buried or lost to historical memory. Through these images of public murders, we gain a sense of the community-wide conspiracies – often dependent upon the complicity of judges and law enforcement officials – that were necessary to protect perpetrators from justice, and we begin to glimpse the depths of racial terrorism.

The trauma that communities and individuals suffer under such circumstances is extremely debilitating, and it resurfaces in future generations if it is not acknowledged and given sufficient attention. STAR is about helping communities to "dig up the past," but with the intention of helping these communities journey through conflict as a means to becoming more inclusive, whole, and functional.

However, truth and reconciliation efforts in the U.S. currently lack certain tools utilized by efforts in other parts of the world. Specifically, U.S. efforts lack state-sanctioned mandates. This means that truth and reconciliation processes would be unable to offer amnesty as an incentive for those who testify, and that a truth and reconciliation commission would lack "teeth," including search and seizure powers.

Although trials of human rights violators and other forms of retributive justice have been an aspect or an outcome of truth and reconciliation processes internationally, conceptions and practices of restorative justice have been explored. Retributive justice focuses on specific crimes and their impact on identifiable victims and perpetrators. Restorative justice, on the other hand, addresses the causes and effects of racial and ethnic violence on an entire community by: (1) analyzing and incorporating the collective needs of diverse groups in the community; (2) documenting human rights issues beyond the acts of perpetrators alone; and (3) promoting community-wide reconciliation. STAR enables local groups to restore honor and integrity to the entire community in the quest for restorative justice.

STAR does not oppose the prosecution of perpetrators. However, STAR does advocate for, and educate communities about, a menu of programs and processes that may contribute to restorative justice and community building. The fact that truth and reconciliation efforts are occurring at the grassroots level in the United States may in some sense be a blessing in disguise. Although a truth and reconciliation model has not been developed yet, investment in truth-telling and community building may lead to sustainable changes where we live, work, and play.

STAR responds to request from communities with histories of lynchings and other communal forms of racial and ethnic violence. STAR partners with communities to adapt the truth and reconciliation process to local needs, on the premise that truth-telling and acknowledgement by all stakeholders must precede healing, reconciliation, and justice for the entire community:

• STARting with requests from local leaders seeking justice and reconciliation for human rights violations.
• STARting in the South while responding to leaders outside the South as resources allow.
• STARting with racial/ethnic violence and supporting similar initiatives on all historic and systemic injustices.

STAR supports projects that require analyzing local community needs, documenting human rights violations, institutional reform and policy recommendations, and advancing community-wide reconciliation.

STAR's first and most significant relationship to date is with the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee (MFMC), and with the citizens of Walton, Oconee, Athens, and Clarke counties who are creating a truth and reconciliation process for their Georgia community. MFMC formed in 1997 out of a desire to address the history of Walton County 's most infamous murders.

In 1946, two African-American couples – Mae Murray and George Dorsey and Dorothy and Roger Malcolm – were waylaid while driving and lynched by a firing squad of 12-15 unmasked white men in broad daylight at the Moore 's Ford Bridge , sixty miles east of Atlanta . No one has ever been prosecuted for these crimes, and it is believed that some of the perpetrators are alive and still reside in local communities with impunity.

Since its creation, MFMC has made amazing strides by memorializing the dead, raising community awareness about the history of the Moore 's Ford incident, building community by organizing multiracial dinners and events, and initiating community dialogue around what a truth and reconciliation process could look like in this community. The need and motivation to work toward reconciliation is clear, evidenced, in part, by MFMC's formal invitation to STAR in 2003 to initiate a consultative relationship with them.

In his book Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, conflict resolution scholar John Paul Lederach defines reconciliation as the place where truth, justice, mercy, and peace meet. As STAR evolved, we recognized that it made sense for us to function as a consultative resource for communities, and to facilitate processes and offer options that allow communities to define truth, justice, mercy, and peace for themselves. STAR recognizes that any truth and reconciliation process must be elicited from the community, so STAR offers a menu of options – a list of programs and events that promote truth-telling and community building – from which the community chooses.

Each individual and each community experiences trauma differently, and therefore each community we work with will have different needs around truth-telling and different opinions about the prospects for reconciliation. MFMC has been doing good work for years prior to its relationship with STAR. Some of the menu options that we suggest, such as creative service projects, memorial observations, and public forums, have already been explored and implemented by MFMC. Since STAR began its relationship with MFMC, it has been clear that some constituencies within the communities that MFMC serves are pushing for prosecution, and envision a process modeled on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including appointed commissioners and public hearings. While this is a viable option, it has become clear that due to continued trauma and more recent incidents of racial violence in the area, public testimony may involve significant risk for some members of the community. Private truth-telling – including accounts documented during the research for Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler's account of the Moore 's Ford killings – continues to be a powerful medium for reconciliation. Descendants of perpetrators have in some cases expressed interest in meeting with descendants of victims.

The public events that the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee continues to plan, including a diversity-themed carnival planned for later this year and a recent "community conversation" on the history of racial violence in Oconee county may encourage more people to speak out publicly about what they know. Ultimately, these events may help to create an environment for public truth-telling.

In addition to offering a menu of options, STAR attempts to model a sustainable and inclusive process in its relationships with community clients, allowing a critical mass of individuals and groups to engage with local history in an authentic and meaningful way. The truth and reconciliation process looks at all levels of a community: individuals, mid-level leadership (e.g., spiritual leaders, school administrators, law enforcement officials), and institutions. A successful process identifies and engages past, present, and future stakeholders in a community. By involving a critical mass of the community in this way, truth and reconciliation becomes sustainable for a community – becomes less of a process, more a perpetual practice.

STAR has encouraged members of MFMC to build bridges with other official and unofficial community leaders in the interest of forming a diverse coalition that can discuss options for the future of local truth and reconciliation efforts. Some difficult questions have emerged: how can MFMC increase participation of various constituencies in a truth and reconciliation effort? Can a truth and reconciliation process happen without more inclusive participation? This is why a menu of options for communities is important, and why menu options that appeal to a range of demographically diverse groups is desirable.

For reasons unrelated to guilt or fear, folks may just not be interested in attending a public truth and reconciliation hearing. (And a truth commission body in the U.S. would have no ability to subpoena witnesses.) If events such as community service projects, book clubs, or poetry readings are also included as part of a truth and reconciliation effort, it can break the ice and may create an appetite for more of the breakthrough work of re-visiting a community's history and re-visioning its future. Apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation are very personal in nature, and a truth and reconciliation process can provide opportunities for these to occur. STAR is planning to host two public forums – one in Atlanta and one in Walton County – in the coming year.

In addition to our relationship with MFMC, STAR is also in conversation with the newly formed Coalition On Unity Reconciliation and Truth (COURT), a Cobb County group that plans to address the history of the Leo Frank lynching in Marietta .

Leo Frank was a Jewish factory owner who was falsely accused of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13 year-old girl who worked in his pencil factory. The Georgia State Supreme Court found Frank guilty in 1915, and although the governor commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, he was later taken from the Milledgeville State Farm Prison and hung from a tree outside the town of Marietta . According to Steve Oney's recent book And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, some members of the lynch mob were from prominent Atlanta families. The events around the lynching led to both the 20th Century resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, with its first group dubbed "The Knights of Mary Phagan," and the creation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). STAR's involvement in this community is still being defined.

Adding to our nation's rich history as a "noble experiment" ( Jefferson ), truth and reconciliation processes offer a new opportunity for strengthening our democratic ideals and advancing our civic virtues. Truth commission processes and events can provide recurrent opportunities to review and redress our nation's characteristic forms of human rights abuses. STAR enters into this experiment hopeful that Americans will act differently at home and around the world if we understand our own history and present from the perspectives available through truth and reconciliation processes and practices.

Further Reading

Bauerlein, Mark. Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta , 1906. San Francisco : Encounter Books, 2001.
Hayner, Priscilla. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. NY: Routledge, 2001.
Lederach, John Paul. Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington , D.C. : United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997.
Oney, Steve. And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. New York : Pantheon, 2003.
Till-Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America . New York : Random House, 2003.
Wexler, Laura. Fire in a Canebreak: The Last Mass Lynching in America . New York : Scribner, 2003.

Web Resources

• Southern Truth & Reconciliation, Inc. Atlanta , Georgia
• Greensboro Truth & Community Reconciliation Project Greensboro , North Carolina
• Hope in the Cities Project Richmond , Virginia
• Institute for Justice & Reconciliation Cape Town , South Africa
• International Center for Transitional Justice New York City , New York
• Strategic Choices in the Design of Truth Commissions Cambridge , Massachusetts
• Global Negotiation Project: Third Side Cambridge , Massachusetts
• "Without Sanctuary" Lynching Photograph Exhibit (Exhibit schedule available on-line)

Appendix E

A Scholar-Practitioner Profile

Theophus "Thee" Smith

Faculty, Emory University Religion Department, 1987-current

thee.smith@emory.edu
 

office: 404 727-0636       dept:   404 727-7596       fax:    404 727-7597

S207 Callaway Center      537 Kilgo Circle                Emory University              Atlanta , GA 30322 USA

Public Scholarship and Social Change Initiatives

Professor Smith’s consulting expertise, workshop facilitation, and speaking engagements are available through Thurman Reconciliation Initiatives (TRI) Inc., a research and educational nonprofit that provides "faith-based resources for conflict transformation and social change."  From 2003-2006 he has been a founding director of Southern Truth and Reconciliation (STAR) Inc.  STAR is a university-community partnership and consulting organization that assists local communities to address their legacy of racial violence through the application of truth and reconciliation practices and related programs (see www.southerntruth.org). The following samples of Professor Smith’s work as a public scholar are available online at www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/RELIGION/faculty/smith.html

"Religions Transforming Religions /Worlds"
"Eucharistic Social Change: A Concise Theology and Practice"
"After Violence: Towards A Normative Practice of "Truth & Reconciliation" .

Academic Life & Teaching

Professor Smith was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), St. John's College ( Annapolis ), Virginia Theological Seminary ( Alexandria ), and the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley). His academic and teaching specialties include philosophy of religion, African American religious studies, liberation theology, and religion and violence, in which areas he teaches in Atlanta , Georgia , USA in Emory University 's undergraduate Department of Religion and Graduate Division of Religion. He is the author of Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America ( Oxford , 1994), and co-editor with Mark Wallace (Swarthmore) of Curing Violence: Essays on René Girard, (Polebridge, 1994).

Research & Memberships

Professor Smith is a member of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and a founding member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R): an international scholarly society dedicated to exploring the relationship between religion and violence in the generation and maintenance of culture, for which he convened at Emory the 1999 annual meeting: Violence Reduction in Theory & Practice: From Primates to Nations (see www.religion.emory.edu/affiliate/COVR/COVR99meeting.html ).  He is also affiliated with Emory's pioneering Law & Religion Program, in which he is specifically engaged in developing "A Normative Practice of Truth and Reconciliation" as informed by South Africa 's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (See public scholarship and sample essays above and online).

Service & Religious Vocation

From 1991-98 Professor Smith was the founding director of the Atlanta Chapter of the National Coalition Building Institute (see www.NCBI.org), an international consulting and training organization based in Washington , D.C. that specializes in diversity training, prejudice reduction, and intergroup conflict resolution. In addition he is an active leader in the International Reevaluation Counseling Communities (see www.RC.org for "Co-Counseling"), a worldwide and grassroots peer counseling and activist movement.  Professor Smith is also active clergy in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta at the Cathedral of St. Philip, in the Atlanta Chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians (UBE), and in the international Community of the Cross of Nails (see www.ccn-northamerica.org/index.html )

7/2007