WHAT HEALING IN AMERICA COULD LOOK LIKE: "We should not bury the past, but rather use its lessons to create a more-positive future.... The impact of allowing a country to digest its history and have an opportunity to hear each other collectively would allow for the creation of a culture of empathy.".

• Author: Boggenpoel, Jesmane
• Position: THE WORLD TODAY

THE PROTESTS inspired by Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many more black Americans have highlighted patterns of racism in the U.S. From slavery to Jim Crow and even now amidst Black Lives Matter protests, the U.S. has upheld racist structures for hundreds of years. With such a deep and unique history of racism, many people wonder how the country can ever recover from its past of injustice.

The U.S., however, is not the only nation with a history of discrimination. One country with a similarly complex history of systemic racism is South Africa. Many Americans have heard, in some capacity, about the South African apartheid. The overt discrimination draws many parallels to the discrimination that black Americans faced. However, South Africa's segregation--amongst other unjust practices--persisted up until the 1990s, meaning even South African millennials have been impacted directly by apartheid.

I saw the consequences firsthand. While growing up in the apartheid structures, I was raised in a historically mixed-race marginalized community that was comprised exclusively of people with my ancestry. There were some moments that allowed for interaction with other kinds of people, though not all of them were positive. I remember as a teenager being spat at by a white boy who walked past me with his clique. As an adult, I realized my low-income upbringing would serve as yet another challenge as I was entering a workforce that, for the most part, was reserved for white people who had far more access than I.

Apartheid left many South African black people feeling similarly about senses of justice, access, and generational oppression to black Americans facing government-backed racism. In order for their country to recover from its dark past, South African leaders had to navigate addressing the emotions from the past while taking meaningful action to improve the future. They did so through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995, which was established by the new government headed by Nelson Mandela to help heal the country and bring about a reconciliation of its people by uncovering the truth about human rights violations that had occurred during the period of apartheid.

The U.S. can learn many lessons from the processes that South Africa went through. South Africans, both black and white, had to deal with immense pain after apartheid. White people worried that, with this new integration, their opportunities would be limited...