What Does Remembering Racial Violence Do? Greensboro’s Truth Commission, Mnemonic Overlap, and Attitudes toward Racial Redress

• Author: Raj Ghoshal
• Published date: 01 April 2015
• Date: 01 April 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/2153368715573608
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Race and Justice
2015, Vol. 5(2) 168-191
What Does Remembering
ª The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
Racial Violence Do?
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2153368715573608
Greensboro’s Truth
raj.sagepub.com
Commission, Mnemonic
Overlap, and Attitudes
toward Racial Redress
Raj Ghoshal1
Abstract
In recent decades, African Americans have called for greater reckoning with
historic race-related violence. One such violent incident took place in Green-
sboro, North Carolina, in 1979, when Klansmen killed five Communist demon-
strators. Greensboro’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created in 2004
as an intervention into collective memory of the killings. In this article, I draw on
a unique survey of 716 respondents about this case to make three arguments.
First, I argue that memory projects can induce mnemonic overlap between
creators and audiences, modestly stimulating support for redress of historic
injustice. Second, I show that while ‘‘preaching to the choir’’ and to undecided
audiences is effective, building project awareness among ideological opponents
triggers increased resistance, not persuasion. Third, I show that audiences filtered
the project’s story through its key characters’ ingrained reputations, especially
that of the Ku Klux Klan, which constrained and enabled the Commission’s
effectiveness in surprising ways. I discuss implications for commemorative proj-
ects as a part of redress.
Keywords
race riots, race and policing, race and public opinion, race/ethnicity, African/black
Americans, white Americans
1 Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, USA
Corresponding Author:
Raj Ghoshal, 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd., Baltimore, MD 21204, USA.
Email: raj.ghoshal@goucher.edu

---

Ghoshal
169
Does memory matter? Political actors who struggle over the interpretation and
commemoration of historic events certainly act as if it does. Confederate enthusiasts
and African Americans contest the meaning of the Civil War. American conservatives
deploy Martin Luther King, Jr.’s endorsement of a color-blind society as an argument
against affirmative action and draw on memory of 1773’s Boston Tea Party to
challenge a president they see as tyrannical. And educators across the United States
teach pupils about the Holocaust, on the grounds that knowledge of this atrocity will
make students more tolerant, less prejudiced, or less violent.
In light of the popular consensus that memory matters, the limited empirical basis
for this consensus is jarring. But scholarly evidence that the past matters has lagged far
behind apparent popular agreement. Scholarship in collective memory for decades
engaged questions of memory production more than questions of memory reception,
as the role that the past plays in constituting present-day identities was assumed more
than it was shown (e.g., Halbwachs, 1925/1992). A few studies have addressed how
efforts to shape memories are received (e.g., Gibson, 2006; Polletta, 1998; Satter-
white, 2005), but this topic remains underexplored.
One importance instance in which memories may matter is in their impact on
Americans’ racial policy views. Current issues involving race and justice are inex-
tricably linked to the past. For example, a great deal of current white–black inequality
can be traced to the economic impact of slavery and segregation on wealth accu-
mulation (Conley, 2009). Affirmative action (Johnson, 1965) and reparations claims
(Robinson, 2001; Winbush, 2003), meanwhile, are centrally grounded in the claim
that currently living African Americans suffer, while other Americans benefit, from
Whites’ expropriation of Blacks’ wealth and labor during slavery and segregation.
Although a large majority of African Americans support affirmative action and
many support reparations, support among other Americans for these policies might be
expected to hinge partly on their factual knowledge of past events, as well as their
attributions of blame or credit for these events. Prior research has found that White
Americans’ subconscious identification with African Americans in the form of ‘‘self-
other overlap’’ (Craemer, 2008, 2009) predicts support for ‘‘pro-Black policies’’ such
as affirmative action in hiring and government programs targeted to assist Black
Americans. Similar to self-other overlap, mnemonic overlap, or the extent to which
non-Black Americans share common African American views of America’s racial
past might also affect non-Black Americans’ support for policies aimed at redress.
This article empirically addresses the relationship between views of the past,
memory projects (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994), and present-day beliefs. Specifically, it asks
whether one recent effort to commemorate a historic clash involving race in the
United States—Greensboro’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—has
affected non-Blacks’ views of past responsibility and present-day redress. In the
following sections, I first lay out extant research on why attitudes toward redress vary
and then consider how memory projects and individual-level memories influence
policy attitudes. I propose that memory projects can shape attitudes on racial redress
by facilitating mnemonic overlap between projects’ creators and audiences. I describe
the project of interest in this study, along with an innovative method for collecting

---

170
Race and Justice 5(2)
data on the project’s reception, and examine several hypotheses and research ques-
tions about links between views of the past and present moral-political convictions.
Findings reveal that the project considered here brought some Whites and others into
mnemonic community with African Americans, affecting views of responsibility and
redress. I also document a backlash effect among some audience members, showing
that projects can actually lose support by reaching the wrong audiences. Finally, I
show that the preexisting reputations of project stories’ characters shapes prescriptive
beliefs about redress in surprising ways, with implications for what elements of past
injustices memory project might seek to emphasize.
Views on Redress and the Role of Memory Projects
Most White Americans see race as having minor effects in the present day United
States (Jones, 2008; Mazzocco, Brock, Brock, Olson, & Banaji, 2006). Given this
context, race-specific policies aimed at reducing inequality or redressing past wrongs
are unpopular. Although estimates vary by question wording (Kopicki, 2014), the bulk
of survey evidence suggests that White support for affirmative action is modest and
may be declining (Jones, 2005; Montanaro, 2013), and Whites overwhelmingly
oppose government cash payments to slave descendants (Craemer, 2010; Mazzocco
et al., 2006; Michelson, 2002; Viles, 2002). Whites are more supportive of symbolic
forms of repair: Campo, Mastin, and Frazer’s (2004) telephone survey about racial
redress found that slight majorities of White Tennesseans supported a government
apology for slavery, while large majorities supported a slavery monument or museum.
However, a 2002 poll found that only 23% of White Americans agreed that corpo-
rations that profited from slavery should apologize and only 35% said such companies
should set up (not ‘‘be required to set up’’) scholarship funds for slave descendants
(Viles, 2002). Further, the extent to which non-Black Americans support government
action to assist African Americans is likely exaggerated in live-interviewer survey
research, as respondents overreport ‘‘politically correct’’ answers (Bonilla-Silva,
2003; Krysan, 1998; Kuklinski, Cobb, & Gilen, 1997). And while racial ‘‘others’’
such as Latinos are more supportive of race-conscious remedies like affirmative action
than Whites, they are less supportive than African Americans (e.g., Montanaro, 2013).
Reasons for opposition to redress for past racial injustice include economic self- (or
group-) interest, ideologies emphasizing the virtue of self-reliance, antipathy or
indifference toward Blacks, and the belief that redress is undeserved (perhaps because
slavery happened long ago to influence the present), among possible causes. These
factors have been considered extensively in research on racial attitudes and views on
affirmative action (e.g., Bobo & Kluegel, 1983; Bobo & Smith, 1996; Craemer, 2008;
Kinder & Sears, 1981; Kinder & Winter, 2001; Kluegel & Smith, 1982; Kuklinski
et al., 1997; Sniderman & Piazza, 1995; Wilson, 2006), but only some have been
tested in the realm of reparation and redress policy. Mazzocco et al.’s experimental
work found that White students’ unawareness of numerous objective disadvantages
faced by African Americans today influenced opposition to reparations, but also
showed that economic self-interest or prejudice (or both) matters. Craemer’s (2008,

---

Ghoshal
171
2009) research on determinants of White support for ‘‘pro-Black policies’’ including
reparations, meanwhile, found that subconscious emotional closeness to Blacks
strongly impacted support for such polices. However, Craemer does not address what
leads to such sympathy, stating that it is idiosyncratic.
The legacies of past racial violence can impact racial justice and views on race in
the present in seemingly contradictory ways. Some evidence shows that higher local
rates of past racial violence are tied to more present-day hate crimes, lesser anti-hate
crime enforcement, higher homicide rates, and greater death penalty support (Durso &
Jacobs, 2013; Jacobs, Carmichael, & Kent, 2005; King, Messner, & Baller, 2009;
Messner, Baller, & Zevenbergen, 2005). This suggests that local collective...