The cost of coming clean
Something I've been thinking about when it comes to what's next politically is how we reckon with the past without being prisoner to it. I don't think the vast majority want to be endlessy re-litigating the American Civil War, Colonialism, and the over-arching politics of white supremacy. We haven't come clean about all these things though, and until we do the specter of our worst political natures will always find ways to roar back.
One thing that helps me when I think about how to come clean about these things is leaning on my experience in development cooperation. I'm lucky that I have colleagues and research partners from Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Their willingness to be candid with me about what real reckoning looks like gave me space to look harder at my own country (the U.S. for those who don't know). I don't think I have to explain why reflecting on my own country's history is relevant in January 2026 - as the violence and terrorism inflicted on Minnesota by federal agents escalates we are recycling the processes that lead to the Kent State killings, the reactionary authoritarianism of the Jim Crow South, or the white slaver rebellion that became the American Civil War.
The only way out of this cycle is to see what is happening as home-grown. There is a tendency among the White commentariat to describe ICE as a Gestapo, as Nazis. Violent totalitarianism as a foreign thing. If we listen to Black voices though, they will rightly say this is entirely home grown. ICE is operating on the same blue print as slave patrols, as the KKK, as white supremacist militias (and yes, taking some cues from abroad). If I can be granted some generalities, for black Americans the Civil Rights Movement was progress but it was far from an endpoint. For White Americans, the Civil Rights Movement was an endpoint: The Civil Rights Act got signed, so it's time to move on from talking about racism. Except it's obviously not.
The cost of coming clean is reckoning with the ultra-violence of slavery until the Civil War, and white supremacy the post-Civil War Jim Crow South. The mass murder of whole black communities. The fact that the states that made up former Confederacy from the end of Reconstruction to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and school integration were essentially a totalitarian white supremacist ethno-state within the United States. There were literal coups against elected local governments that did not toe the white supremacist line. Pluralism in the United States has been an exception of the last 60 years not the norm for the last 250.
If reckoning with this racial history is the starting point in the U.S., the future of development cooperation means reckoning with the monstrous scale of colonialism as well. Where do we even start? The Transatlantic Slave Trade? The atrocities of Belgian King Leopold II's authorities in Congo Free State? The British military killing and interning hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia during the Malaya Emergency? Like many white Americans who imagine the Civil Rights Act to be the end of racism, many Europeans are content to say "well colonialism ended!" and hope the conversation stops there.
But we can't have things like equal partnerships between high-income and low- and medium-income countries without European countries accepting the costs of reckoning. The German government when asked about the Herero Genocide in Namibia cannot forever say "Whoa whoa, that was the Kaiserreich not the Bundesrepublik" when the question of reparations comes up. British society cannot reflexively pearl-clutch about Cecil Rhodes being a "man of different times" when South African university students rightfully want statues of a man who was an inveterate white supremacist and imperialist removed from their university campuses. Perhaps was makes this so hard is that the list of things that needs to be made right is so tragically, paralyzingly long.
So how do we move forward? What is the cost of coming clean for white Americans and Europeans? I think the cost is giving up control of the agenda. This might mean tangible things like paying reparations; it might simply mean bearing responsibility on official terms without qualifiers. It certainly means hearing what post-colonialism and a pluralistic world look like from African, Latin American, and Asian perspectives, and my goal will be to make this site a space for that.