Examining the Power of Official Apologies

Last trimester our class investigated the meaning the past holds for the present to connect our study of U.S. history to the contemporary world. In doing so, we turned to a current events activity about the question of reparations. Reparations are broadly understood as acts or processes making amends for a serious wrong. The United Nations expands further: “Adequate, effective, and prompt reparations is intended to promote justice by redressing gross violations of international human rights law or serious violations of international humanitarian law.” While many people in the U.S. context rightly associate reparations with the legacy of slavery, the topic is also relevant to a range of other related injustices throughout world history. 

How, when, and where to pursue reparations are difficult, complex questions. Reparation is not just a matter of financial compensation, but also a means to address the past and its ongoing impact on the present. There are rarely straightforward answers to such historical inquiries, and so the classroom activity was not meant to simplify the varied ways to approach reparations. In these types of current events activities bridging the past with the present, students are challenged to unleash their historical imaginations. Their most prevalent concerns ranged from understanding how their own lives are implicated in past wrongs to bearing witness to—and often feeling distraught about—the magnitude of the harms that persist today. Still others worried about the practical aspects of reparations, wondering how compensation would be funded, or what forms it would take, and who would be eligible to receive it.

Adopting an exercise from the Zinn Education Project, students delved deeper into diverse stories of living survivors representing dozens of existing cases for reparations—some successful, some pending—including the Holocaust in Europe, the sexual trafficking and exploitation of “comfort women” in Asia, and the internment of Japanese Americans in North America during World War II; the coerced medical experimentation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the forced sterilization of women during the American Eugenics Movement in the 20th century; and the colonial policies of racial apartheid in South Africa. Students were both deeply troubled and pleasantly surprised by the detailed accounts of real people experiencing the whole spectrum of official reparations. 

To help students understand the true import of an apology as the beginning of any reparations, we began with a short narrative writing exercise asking them to brainstorm examples of apologies they had offered and received in their own lives. Once each student had come up with a few examples, they were asked to choose one to write about, considering the following questions: How did the nature of the harm or misdeed shape the kind of apology that was required? Was the apology you received or offered genuine and heartfelt? Superficial and insincere? How did you know the difference? Did it include an action to address the wrong? Or was it just a verbal offering? Why are apologies important? 

Many students reflected on apologies from family and friends, pointing out that adults in their lives often apologized by saying, “I am sorry you felt that way,” rather than “I am sorry I did that,” a point which many felt compromised the apology from the start. There is something powerful about giving and receiving a genuine, heartfelt apology. It establishes the reality of the wrong—rather than denying or minimizing it—while opening the possibility of a constructive way forward together. Partial apologies, whether off-base or insincere or tepid, leave a bad taste in our mouths and can even lead to greater pain and suffering. Students talked then about effective ways to apologize and how the process of making amends is just as significant as the proposed resolutions. 

This process of connecting the dots from the individual to the institutional, from the local to the global, eventually brought us full circle in our appreciation of the power of apologies, advancing our critical thinking on how, where, and when we could and should redress historical injustice. The activity that day provided students with some tools to assess not only their personal lives, but also the larger world they inhabit as young and responsible global citizens.