THERE'S A THEORY in peacebuilding that it can take as long to heal from a conflict as the conflict itself lasted. Depending on whom you ask, the conflict in Northern Ireland lasted 800 years, 400 years, or 30 years. The Good Friday Agreement officially ended the violence in 1998. Any way you spin it, this place isn’t very far along the healing journey.
The violence here lasted so long that it became almost normal. In my last taxi ride during grad school, the driver picked me up on the Antrim Road. “Do you like living here?” I asked. “I liked it better in the good old days—20 to 30 years ago,” he said. “It weren’t that violent. It were a pretty stable time, other than the bombs and guns and murders.”
I asked him if he’d been affected much by the violence. “No, not too much,” he said. “I mean, there was the time I saw my brother walking down the Falls Road, and a black taxi pulled up, rolled down its window, and blew his head off. I remember seeing my mother trying to put his brains back in.”
He spoke as if it were not unusual, as if it almost were not noteworthy.
Peacebuilding theory has a word for us in the U.S. too. The abomination of slavery is not ancient history. It ended just over 150 years ago. More than 4,000 black Americans were lynched by white terrorists. Jim Crow laws stole the liberties of millions of black citizens. Today, slavery has a new manifestation in mass incarceration.
For simplicity’s sake, if we chart the duration of this “conflict” of racism from the arrival of the first kidnapped Africans to the signing of the Civil Rights Act, that’s 345 years. If we were in a “post-conflict” healing journey, then we’d be only 50 years or so into a very long process. To say that race should now be a nonissue in America is to reveal a profound ignorance about the nature of conflict and reconciliation. We aren’t out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.
But rather than let this lead to despair, we’d be wise to let it lead to courage, hope, and action. We get to be part of the journey toward healing and transforming our fractured communities. None of us need to be saviors; we just need to contribute. Extraordinary and ordinary contributions—they all belong.
Reprinted with permission from Herald Press.
Michael T. McRay is a Nashville-based writer, facilitator, and story-practitioner, and the author of I Am Not Your Enemy.
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